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SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 



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SIX MASTERS 
IN DISILLUSION 



BY 



ALGAR THOROLD 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

29 WEST 23RD STREET 
1909 



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A MON AMI 
JEAN-JACQUES OLIVIER 

L'HISTORIEN EMERITE DE LA SCENE FRANCAISE 
AU XVIII E SIECLE 



The first six Essays in this volume 
have already appeared, much in their 
present form, in the Edinburgh, In- 
dependent, and Albany Reviews. The 
Author's thanks are due to Messrs. 
Longmans, and to the Progressive 
Press, Ltd., for permission to reprint 
them. The Epilogue appears here 
for the first time. 



TO THE READER 

In order that the reader may be as little disap- 
pointed as possible with these studies, I must 
explain that they are not concerned with strictly 
contemporary disillusion. The period which they 
are intended, in a very partial and tentative way, to 
illustrate is behind us, and its forces are in great 
measure already spent. Contemporary disillusion, 
of which, among the writers here noticed, Anatole 
France alone could fairly be considered an example, 
is a different matter. Our fathers were rationalists, 
and were naive enough to think that Theology 
stood or fell by its claims to rationality. They 
thought that the cosmology and psychology of 
Christianity, the propositions which it enunciated 
about the nature of man and the world he finds 
himself in, were intended to be taken as facts. 
As facts they tested them, with the result that the 
account of the world and man contained in the 



x SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Sacred Books of Christianity and the authoritative 
decrees of the Church, have ceased to form part of 
the mental culture of the West-European races. 
For although the Catholic Church still lives — and 
he must know little of humanity who doubts that it 
will go on living — ecclesiastical cosmology, history 
and psychology are things of the past as irrelevant 
to contemporary knowledge as the Hindu Pan- 
theon or Muslim Demonology. The work of the 
rationalist emancipators in this respect has been 
done, and done so thoroughly that it forms part of 
the unquestioned mental heritage that everybody 
takes for granted. Nevertheless we, or at least 
those of us who are disillusioned to-day, are not 
rationalists. We have pushed analysis further 
than our fathers did, nay, in our turn, we have 
laid sacrilegious hands on their standard of truth. 
It has fared no better at our hands than that of 
their fathers did at theirs. This is, however, not 
the place to discuss contemporary disillusion. 

It is in the disillusionment consequent on this 
change of attitude towards Christianity in which 
the writers studied here agree. In nearly every- 
thing else they differ. Fontenelle, a sort of smil- 
ing malicious Precursor of the Evangel of the last 



TO THE READER xi 

two centuries, seems to attain prophetically the 
scepticism of a later period. He was a very 
difficult person to pay with words. Merimee, 
equally detached from the optimism of the 
eighteenth century, presents rather the elegant 
cynicism of the man of the world who will not 
admit that he is wounded to the heart. The 
masterly studies of ecclesiastical psychology which 
we owe to Ferdinand Fabre indicate one aspect of 
the line of defence adopted by the clergy against 
the changed world in which they find themselves. 
That attitude was an important factor in the 
politics of every country in Europe where the 
Church had power during the nineteenth century, 
and contributed most effectively to the detachment 
of the educated classes from Christianity. Maeter- 
linck, on the other hand, while emphatically post- 
Christian, and therefore deriving from the specific 
disillusionment of the eighteenth century, retains 
much of the optimism of the Fathers of the 
Encyclopaedia. Indeed his optimism is but faintly 
tempered by the delays and incertitudes of science, 
not at all by philosophical analysis, while his 
appreciation of the enormous difficulties in the 
way of any serious human advance, his view of 



xii SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

the actual situation, seem at times disconcertingly- 
vague. But then he has the divine gift of mysti- 
cism, a very special mysticism of his own, if you 
will, inspired, in so far as it is philosophical, by 
Hartmann's ' Unconscious,' made effective through 
the essential poetry of his own nature. 

Anatole France, as I have said, represents a riper 
mood of scepticism, the mood of Renan in his last 
years. The vision of the age of reason which 
inspires the labours of the Encyclopaedists no 
longer inspires him. In him disillusion may be 
said to reach its term. Yet, in many ways, he is 
the most dix-huitieme of any writer of the present 
time. The optimism, which, as far as rational 
tests go, is in no better position than theology, 
has nevertheless left in his mind a sweet and 
mellow compassion for humanity, an inextinguish- 
able love of man, which gives an irresistible 
attractiveness to his work at its best, and then his 
exquisite manner, the naive charm with which 
he presents his purely intellectual perversity recalls 
so delightfully the mignardise of the age of salons. 

Among these writers perhaps the most bitter 
and poignant master in disillusion is Huysmans. 
Disillusion does not remain a purely intellectual 



TO THE READER xiii 

phase, and no one has expressed more vividly than 
he, its sentimental and sensuous reactions. The 
course which his personal disillusion among other 
motives led him to adopt, while itself obviously 
outside legitimate criticism, serves nevertheless as 
the measure of the depth to which that disillusion 
went. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

TO THE READER, ... v 



FONTENELLE, i 

prosper m£rim£e, . . . .26 

FERDINAND FABRE, 56 

JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS, .... 80 

MAETERLINCK, 96 

ANATOLE FRANCE, 119 

EPILOGUE, 147 



FONTENELLE 

The extraordinary clear-headedness of the French, 
their readiness to pursue an idea to its logical term 
and its complete literary and social expression, gives 
to their fortunes at any given moment, an air of 
finality which seems at first sight to contradict that 
law of perpetual variation, which we know to reign 
in the process of human affairs, as in all other mani- 
festations of Nature. It is needless to say that 
this appearance is delusive ; changes occur in 
France as elsewhere. And, owing perhaps to 
this very capacity for logic in the French, they 
occur there in the most startling and dramatic 
way : generally in the way of a complete volte-face ; 
all must be pulled down, all must be built anew. 
Napoleon has hardly climbed to the height of his 
uncertain despotism, when he proceeds to remodel 
the whole religious and social life of the nation, as 
if he were founding an empire for eternity, instead 
of for eleven years. He falls, and Monarchy 
and Republic follow each other with bewildering 
rapidity. Nevertheless below the surface, scintil- 

A 



2 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

lating with coups dlitat and proclamations, appeals 
to the people and counter-proclamations, all based 
on mutually exclusive first principles, the work of 
slow and gradual transition goes on. The char- 
acter of an individual does not move as quickly as 
his mere intellect : still more uneven in their gait 
are mental and temperamental changes in a nation. 
This law of variability, the condition of all life, was 
never more completely ignored than in the France 
of the seventeenth century. All then was built 
for eternity, and seemed, indeed, in a fair way to 
possess it. The great chateaux of the period, 
some of which, spared by the Revolution, still 
stand as symbols of that brilliant past, did not 
defy the hand of time more audaciously than the 
theories of its philosophers, theologians and poli- 
ticians. They were more successful in their de- 
fiance, because masonry, if good enough, enjoys a 
permanence denied to systems of thought. From 
the great King himself — one of the few kings who 
have also been statesmen — down to the lay-sisters 
of Port Royal, all, whether their cause were the 
political greatness of the nation, the superiority of 
the Ancients over the Moderns, or the niceties 
of prevenient Grace, fought in it from the point of 
view which may be supposed to animate St. 
Michael in his contest with Lucifer. Truth was 
absolute, Truth was eternal, error must, in the long 



FONTENELLE 3 

run, fail from a sort of metaphysical necessity. It 
was but a dream, though a great and majestic one, 
and France has not yet got through the throes of 
her awakening. Nevertheless some of the acutest 
intellects that have ever been, took it for a reality. 
Let us humble ourselves. 

There could be no greater mistake than to 
imagine that the affirmations of the seventeenth 
century in thought, in theology, in statecraft, were 
but vain forms of words, idly repeated by a genera- 
tion which had no taste for speculative inquiry. 
On the contrary, that century was a far more 
truly philosophical period than the succeeding one 
which usurped the name. Pascal, the Prometheus 
of modern Catholicism, stands alone in the magni- 
ficence of his despair, Descartes and Malebranche 
are the two French philosophers who have a real 
claim to be considered metaphysicians. The 
genius of the age was constructive in every de- 
partment of human affairs. It was constructive, 
and it undertook its task in an a priori spirit. 
Every one argued from absolute premisses to irre- 
fragable conclusions. It was not only the party in 
authority that did so; Jurieu treated the recalci- 
trant Bayle in precisely the same way as he himself 
had been treated by Bossuet. It did not occur to 
any one to appeal to facts, partly because most of 
the controversies in the air could hardly be affected 



4 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

by such an appeal, and partly because men had 
hardly come to recognise their relevance to their 
own well-being. Yet, just then, unsuspected by 
philosophers and theologians, after an interval of 
centuries, during which men had a free hand with 
which to fashion a cosmos in their own image, the 
Fact was being born again into the world of human 
significance. It was their unconsciousness of this 
which delivered these great thinkers bound into 
the hands of their successors of the following cen- 
tury, men as a rule considerably their inferiors, 
both in intellect and imagination. Already when 
the glory of Lewis the Great was at its height, 
when Bossuet's Universal History appeared to 
culminate, and thereby find its justification in the 
Church and State of France, the man was born 
who represented in his life and work, more com- 
pletely perhaps than any contemporary, the coming 
spirit of negation and criticism which was surely to 
sap the foundations of that splendid edifice. That 
man was Fontenelle. 

Bernard le Bovier, Sieur de Fontenelle, was born 
at Rouen in 1657. It was one of his originalities 
to live to be a centenarian, an originality which en- 
abled him to fill successively the roles of prophet 
and traditional authority. To the seventeenth 
century he prophesied of what was to come, and 
to the eighteenth he stood as a reminder of its 



FONTENELLE 5 

origins. No one contributed more than he did to 
the bringing about of that vast change in opinion 
which occurred during his lifetime. 

The right view of Fontenelle is not quite easy. 
No one was ever less like an apostle of new and 
unwelcome truths. He was the first specimen of 
a new race of writers. He wrote poetry without 
being a poet, philosophy without being a philo- 
sopher, science without being an experimentalist. 
He does not appear to have had a passion for 
truth, but, on the whole, to have preferred it ; 
the gossip of his time reflects him as moved by 
a tempered curiosity, mitigated by a love of ease 
and good food. Voltaire, whose enthusiasm could 
hardly brook so measured a zeal, summed him up, 
not without a touch of malice, as ' le discret Fon- 
tenelle.' His bonne amie, Mme. du Tencin, 
placing her hand on his heart one day, said to 
him: ' Vous riavez la que du cerveau' Although 
he allowed Mme. de Lambert to be his almoner, 
he appeared to pride himself on his egotism. To 
him is attributed the well-known recipe for happi- 
ness — tenir le cceur froid et festomac chaud. He 
may have thought it, but it would hardly have 
been in keeping with his discretion to have said 
so. His wit was inimitable. An aged lady having 
one day said to him : ' It seems that Providence 
has forgotten us on this earth,' ' Chut, on pourra 



6 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

nous entendre, 5 replied Fontenelle, placing his 
finger on his mouth with an air of mystery. His 
main characteristic was moderation in all things, a 
moderation which evidently must have been based 
on singularly torpid senses. Mme. Geoffrin tells us 
that he never laughed or wept, he was never in a 
hurry, and never even approximated to losing his 
temper. When he took an apartment he left the 
furniture exactly as he found it, without changing a 
nail. Most wonderful of all, when he had gout, 
it was painless; 'seulement son pied devenait du 
coton, il le posait sur un fauteuil, et c etait tout.' 

Before proceeding to the part he played in 
forming his age, it will be useful to consider, rather 
more in detail, the nature of that great change in 
human opinion to which I have already referred, 
and which marks off the eighteenth from the pre- 
ceding century. Bossuet gave to the absolutism, 
both civil and ecclesiastical, of his time a final and 
classical expression ; in order, then, to know what it 
was that the eighteenth century superseded, it is to 
Bossuet that we must q-o. One of the clearest heads 
and greatest masters of style that ever lived, he 
never leaves us in any doubt as to his meaning. 
* If,' says Sir James Stephen, 'it were the order of 
nature that God should be represented upon earth 
by infallible priests and irresponsible kings, it would 
be impossible to imagine a nobler system of educa- 



FONTENELLE 7 

tion for a great king than that which Bossuet con- 
ceived, or a teacher better suited to carry it out 
than Bossuet himself.' The education of the ill- 
fated dauphin furnished him with the occasion for 
the expression of his theory of human life. The 
Connaissance de Dieu et de Soi-meme, the Discours 
sur I Histoire Universelle, and the Politique tirde 
de lEcriture Sainte, were the three divisions into 
which his teaching naturally fell, and these books 
remain for ever among the finest examples of the 
constructive power of human genius and the most 
important landmarks in the history of European 
thought. Their rhetoric is so ample and so mag- 
nificent, their reasoning so close and so solid, that 
even now one is tempted to overlook the baseless- 
ness of their premisses, and can hardly believe that 
so substantial-seeming a fabric melts under criti- 
cism into 'air, thin air,' with all 'the cloud-capped 
towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples l 
of its visionary splendour. 

Renan has told us that the mediaeval scholastic 
was, in spite of his mysticism, a sound rationalist, 
i.e. he accepted the fact of revelation as the ultimate 
term of a process of reasoning which started from 
grounds level with the rest of experience, and that 
it was not until such grounds had given way, that, 
ecclesiastical apologists were driven to ' prove the 
divinity of Jesus Christ by the battle of Marengo/ 



8 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Bossuet would have shared Renan's contempt for 
the modern apologists of ' Fideism.' It certainly 
would be hard to find in Voltaire or in Tom Paine 
a more uncompromising expression of the principles 
of the early rationalists than the following little 
piece of epistemology which occurs in the De la 
Connaissance de Dieu et de Soi-meme. * The 
understanding (l'entendement) is the light which 
God has given us for our guidance. It has different 
names ; in its inventive and penetrating capacity it 
is called spirit (esprit) : in so far as it judges and 
directs to truth and goodness, it is called reason 
and judgment. Reason, in so far as it turns us 
from the true evil of man, which is sin, is called 
conscience.' And he says that reason, if not 
seduced by passion, is infallible. ' The understand- 
ing is never forced to err, and never does so except 
from want of attention : and if it judges wrongly by 
following the senses or passions derived from them 
too readily, it will correct its judgment if a right will 
make it attentive to its object and itself' (The 
italics are mine.) Certainly Bossuet cannot be said 
to err in putting the power of reason too low. 
What was it, then, he lacked ? He lacked facts, or 
rather he took for facts what were not facts, and 
the reason he did so was that he had no criticism. 
His superb eloquence and the rationalism of his 
process blinded him to the sources of his premisses, 



FONTENELLE 9 

which were, in truth, his conclusions. He some- 
what naively betrays himself in his controversy 
with Richard Simon, the Oratorian father, who, 
two centuries before Loisy, maintained in the 
Catholic Church the right of reason to investigate 
the title-deeds of theology. ' Les dates font tout en 
ces matieres /' he cries. Yes, indeed. All the 
more reason, one would think, to subject them to 
the severest scrutiny. Let us, however, not be 
unjust. It would be idle and absurd to blame 
Bossuet for his lack of acquaintance with the science 
of historical criticism ; it is not illegitimate to 
deplore the spirit of blind certitude which prevented 
him understanding the nature and relevance of Pere 
Simon's inquiries. He seems to have regarded 
such speculations from that purely conventional and 
professional point of view which the more educated 
Christian pulpit of to-day, whether Catholic or 
Protestant, does not hesitate to disavow. The 
view which Bossuet derived from, among others, 
' quatre ou cinq faits authentiques et plus clairs que 
la lumiere du soleil (qui) font voir notre religion 
aussi ancienne que le monde ' — one gasps at the 
statement — was one of the most complete and 
universal absolutism. Whatever might be said 
about nature, it was indeed the divine order ' that 
God should be represented upon earth by infallible 
priests and irresponsible kings.' And the chain of 



10 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

such representatives had never been broken. ' From 
Innocent XL, who fills to-day so worthily the first 
place in the Church,' he traces back that august 
line through St. Peter and the Pontiffs of the ancient 
Law to Moses and Aaron : ' de la jusqu a l'origine du 
monde ! quelle suite, quelle tradition, quel enseigne- 
ment merveilleux ! ' One is reminded of Pascal's 
* Sem qui a vu Lamech, qui a vu Adam, a vu aussi 
Jacob qui a vu ceux qui ont vu Moise. Done le 
deluge et la creation sont vrais.' Certainly Bossuet 
was right, as a matter of tactics, in resenting criti- 
cism of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. 
He was right, that is to say, so long as it was 
possible to suppress such criticism by other than 
critical methods : but although he knew it not, the 
day of such absolute power, whether in the realm 
of opinion or politics, was drawing to its close. 
And now we may return to the part played by 
Fontenelle in the transition. 

What that transition led to primarily was the 
emancipation of the individual judgment from the 
control of authority of any kind. This emancipa- 
tion constituted the first ' moment ' of modern 
rationalism. In that moment the individual was 
conceived as self-subsisting, infallible in his under- 
standing (to which understanding, precisely repro- 
duced in every human being, ' Reality ' was exactly 
correlative), and perfect in will, i.e. spontaneously 



FONTENELLE 11 

and naturally good. Ignorance and sin, moral and 
intellectual evil, were brought about by the environ- 
ment of humanity, and were due to the institutions 
which prevented man's understanding and will 
having free play. Taken as a whole and in its 
maturity this attitude represents the most naive 
and simple form of individualistic optimism. Its 
philosopher was Voltaire and its religion was 
Deism ; and the French Revolution and Kant were 
lying in wait for it. Though the apprehensions on 
which the movement was based were essentially 
positive, its first attitude was inevitably one of 
negation — negation of the values enshrined in the 
system with which it found itself in conflict. That 
system, as we have seen, held the whole of human 
life in the meshes of authority ; the first task of 
the emancipators was then to dislodge authority. 
Until that was done nothing could be done. Now 
the phenomenal basis of the Church's authority was 
as such, unsound, for the facts on which it was 
alleged to rest could not be proved. Bossuet's line 
of communication between Heaven and Earth was 
discovered, on investigation, to be non-existent. 
This was the position of the early rationalists, and 
so far they were right, and, as long as the Church 
confined her apologetics to mere empiricism, she 
was bound to be beaten, for she was not so good 
an empiricist as the philosophes. When, however, 



12 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

from being negative, they became positive, and 
took over human nature themselves on the schema- 
tism of the authority of the understanding, relying 
on the formal contraries of the Church's ethical 
teaching, on i.e. the natural rectitude of each 
human will as such, and on the perfectibility, in 
terms of present experience, of humanity considered 
as an aggregate of individuals, they failed. Kant 
blew up their naive objectivism, showed that the 
Deistic God who was conceived as a part only of all 
reality was a mass of contradictions insoluble to 
the individual understanding, while the Revolution 
and its resulting reactions gave pause to their social 
speculations. So it comes about that the name of 
a pioneer of the movement like Fontenelle is mainly 
associated with rebellion against the Church. 
M. Faguet has severely criticised his methods. 
I would suggest in deprecation of his criticism that 
it cannot have been very easy at the time to see 
how such an attack could be led. For although 
ecclesiastical authority could not, in strict logic and 
theology, have axiomatic value, for its existence 
was given as a phenomenal fact, based like others 
on evidence, appealing finally to the individual 
judgment, yet in process of time it had naturally 
enough come to have some such value for its 
adherents. And, at the time of which I am writing, 
only very few French men or women were not its 



FONTENELLE 13 

adherents. Moreover, on the Catholic premisses, 
the moral values of life were inextricably inter- 
twined with the assents of Faith : it was impossible 
to prove the purity of the motives which led to 
their rejection. If the orthodox were unable to 
impute that favourite commonplace of the contro- 
versial pulpit, a desire for sensual indulgence, to the 
Freethinkers, they could always fall back upon 
pride, an absolutely unanswerable charge. Also 
it must be remembered that although Louis xiv 
had refused, at the time of the Revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes, to re-establish the suppressed 
Inquisition, the Parliament of Paris did not scruple 
to use force in defence of orthodoxy. All this 
rendered necessary, or appeared to render neces- 
sary, to the great men who began the emancipation 
of the French mind, a course of systematic conceal- 
ment of the real extent of their dissent from the 
popular creed, which, in our own day, would be 
repugnant, it may be hoped, to both the defenders 
and the opponents of any established form of 
Christianity. 

It is impossible to deny that Fontenelle had a 
natural aptitude for the part. Indeed, so admirably 
fitted was he for it that, on the providential theory 
of the apparition of great men, such a coincidence 
between the workman and the task seems to speak 
incontrovertibly in favour of a special design. To 



14 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

say as much as this is to admit that Fontenelle's 
character leaves much to be desired : I have 
already pointed out that it was not through the 
individual superiority of their champions that the 
ideas of the eighteenth century succeeded in 
replacing those of the preceding one. It was the 
stars in their courses that fought for them, the 
process of nature, the unconscious dialectic of 
things, that was their secret accomplice. 

Fontenelle's first appearance in literature, apart 
from his share in the quarrel of the Ancients and 
the Moderns, with which we are here hardly 
concerned, was, oddly enough, as a poet. It has 
been ingeniously remarked that while his ideas 
were in advance of his time, his style was behind 
it. This is true of his poetry at least. His 
Pastorales, his Bergeries and his j&glogues are pure 
Louis xiii. Inane and insipid as they are, they 
are, however, without the note of falseness charac- 
teristic of the genre. His shepherds do not talk 
like poets and philosophers, and he cleverly avoids 
the snare of the literary convention of rusticity. 
This is something to be thankful for, but not to be 
false is not enough for art. His Coryns and 
Phebes are pure nullities. They simply do not 
exist at all. In his Discours sur la nature de 
fliglogue he naively remarks : ' La poesie pastorale 
n'a pas grand charme si elle ne roule que sur les 



FONTENELLE 15 

choses de la campagne. Entendre parler de 
brebis et de chevres cela n'a rien par soi-meme qui 
puisse plaire.' The opinion is defensible, but 
seems out of place on the lips of a pastoral poet. 
He appears to have seen only one thing in the 
'simple life,' namely leisure, and judges, in his 
dispassionate way, that this would probably lead to 
an unusual development of amativeness. So he 
gives us scenes of a cool and measured gallantry, 
in which neither his own nor his reader's interest 
is ever for a moment seriously engaged. One 
imagines him reading them aloud to Mme. du 
Tencin or Mme. de Lambert, punctuated by the 
handling of his snuff-box, and an occasional 
drawing-room smirk. Truly, ' Cest une chose 
(Tune tristesse morne, que les juvenilia d'un homme 
qui ri a jamais eu de jetmesse.' It is unnecessary 
even to mention his tragedies, which are the 
productions, says M. Faguet, of a man who is the 
nephew of Corneille, but who appears to be his 
uncle. Fontenelle was clever enough to realise in 
time that he had mistaken his vocation. Perhaps 
it came home to him when he was correcting 
the proofs of his fourth Eclogue, in which occurs 
what is surely the most unpoetical line ever written 
in metre : 

' Quand on a le coeur tendre, il ne faut pas qu'on aime.' 
La Bruyere, who hated him, gave him a place 



16 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

among his ' Caracteres ' as Cydias. ' Cydias (est) 
bel esprit : c'est sa profession. II a une enseigne, 
un atelier, des ouvrages de commande, et des 
compagnes qui travaille sous lui. Prose, vers, que 
voulez-vous ? il reussit egalement en Tun et en 
l'autre. Demandez-lui des lettres de consolation, 
ou sur une absence, il les entreprendra ; prenez les 
toutes faites et entrez dans son magasin, il y a a 
choisir.' There is this amount of truth under La 
Bruyere's rather savage attack, that Fontenelle, 
while entirely devoid of enthusiasm, except on one 
subject which we will shortly consider, possessed 
so supple a brain as to produce the effect of a 
universal intelligence. As a poet he failed, nor 
need his failure surprise us, for more than a supple 
brain is required for the production of poetry. 
The fact is that he was a characteristic and 
magnificent man of letters, being, indeed, the first 
specimen of that type which was to play so 
important a part throughout the eighteenth century. 
Now the man of letters, as such, does not need to 
be an original thinker, still less need he be a 
creative artist. On the other hand he requires, in 
order to fulfil his functions in the republic of the 
mind, a quick and facile intelligence, apt to seize 
the finer shades of opinion, all of which he should 
be ready to welcome in turn. For he must be 
without prejudices of any kind, which, in the 



FONTENELLE 17 

average state of human nature, is tantamount to 
saying he must eschew personal convictions. He 
is skilled to detect the real trend of ideas ; among 
contemporary notions he readily, and, as it were, 
instinctively, distinguishes those that are pregnant 
with the future from merely associational survivals. 
He is to the thinkers who are the creative forces of 
the time, what the Pense'e-vi nt^r is to the moral 
philosopher, he circulates the small change of their 
ideas. He can only permit himself one passion, 
curiosity : but the more he has of that the better. 
Fontenelle was all this in a supreme degree. > I 
have said that he had one enthusiasm. There was 
one thing in which that dilettante, indifferent spirit 
really did believe, and that one thing was science. 
Here he showed the flair of the perfect man of 
letters, in recognising, almost at its birth, the new 
energy which was to play such a part in the 
immediate future, while, at the same time, he 
gratified his curiosity, the most fundamental and 
serious tendency of his nature. Already, in 1680, 
when St. Simon had set the fashion to the Court of 
an occasional retreat in the austere cloisters of de 
Ranee, Fontenelle was in the habit of disappearing 
for several days at a time. He was not at La 
Trappe, but in a little house in the Faubourg St. 
Jacques. Here he used to meet and confer with 
the mathematician Varignon, the Abbe de St. 



18 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Pierre, and other scientific persons. This little 

house was, indeed, the cradle of the eighteenth 

century in France. If Bayle provided in his 

dictionary an arsenal of sceptical arguments for the 

philosophes to direct against the Church, it was 

from the c'enacle of the Faubourg St. Jacques that 

the positive side of the movement proceeded. 

That positive side aimed at what all the scepticism 

in the world never could have effected, the 

substitution of the prestige of science for that of 

the Church. It is often said that Fontenelle, 

unlike those robust dogmatists who carried the 

movement which he had helped to initiate to its 

maturity, was a sceptic. It is very much a 

question of words. All who question the values of 

popular theology or politics are apt to incur the 

charge. For it is the nature of those values to 

be held by those who maintain them with such 

immediacy of conviction that discussion of any kind 

is apt to seem an irrelevant impertinence, more or 

less certainly of the nature of doubt. I do not think 

that Fontenelle was in doubt on the subject of 

Christian theology, as the tradition of the Church 

of his day presented it. In spite of his cautious 

mode of expression, of the modesty — or diplomacy 

— with which he refrained from pushing his 

arguments to their legitimate conclusion, from 

committing himself to an open breach with ecclesi- 



FONTENELLE 19 

astical authority, there is, I think, no sort of doubt 
that he positively, and with full conviction, rejected 
the whole system. The Fathers of the Society of 
Jesus, who are not supposed to be particularly 
stupid people, were quick to detect the * essential 
impiety' of his Histoire des Oracles, which is, 
ostensibly, a defence of pure religion from the 
ill-informed zeal of its misguided advocates. Nay, 
we must go further. Not only do I think that 
Fontenelle was definitely anti-Christian, but it 
seems unquestionable that his mind, his tempera- 
ment, his character, call it what you will, was 
incurably hostile to religion of any kind. He did 
not accept the Church's Messiah, and felt no sort 
of necessity to look for another. The good 
Fathers were right, his impiety was essential. To 
slightly alter a well-known ecclesiastical formula, 
he may be said to have been invincibly irreligious. 
This appears I think very clearly in his Entretiens 
sur la Plurality des Mondes, which is interesting as 
being one of the first attempts at the popularisation 
of science. It was published in 1686. Fontenelle 
says in the preface that he asks the same attention 
from ladies in order to understand all he has to 
tell them — ' tout ce systeme de philosophie ' — as 
is required to enjoy the Princesse de Cleves. And 
so clear is his exposition, that his astronomy reads 
like a novel. The book had an immediate and 



20 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

immense success. Toutes ces dames devoured it 
eagerly, which shows the ground covered in fifteen 
years since the publication of the Famines Savantes. 
In 1 67 1 the Entretiens would have died of ridicule. 
The form is very characteristic. The astronomer 
shows the heavens at night to a charming mar- 
quise, whose questions and comments enable him 
to relieve the strain of the reader's attention, by 
neatly turned compliments and gallant epigrams. 
The marquise having remarked that the beauty of 
the day is that of a brilliant blonde, while the 
beauty of the night possesses the more touching 
quality of the brunette, her instructor replies : ' J 'en 
conviens : mais en recompense une blonde comme 
vous me ferait encore mieux rever que la plus belle 
nuit du monde avec toute sa beaute brune.' The 
little book is not, however, made up of such courtly 
trifling. It goes far, very far. ' II serait embaras- 
sant en theologie qu'il y eut des hommes qui ne 
descendissent point d'Adam . . . mais je ne mets 
dans la lune que des habitants qui ne sont point 
des hommes.' A valuable concession indeed to a 
theologian inclined to embarrassment. This insidi- 
ous remark is a good instance of Fontenelle's anti- 
theological tactics. But it is not in such feline 
strokes of the paw, that the bias of the book is most 
apparent. It is rather in the complete absence of 
any religious sentiment, or even poetical emotion at 



FONTENELLE 21 

all. The author shows himself blankly unreceptive 
of the feelings which, a hundred years later, would 
stir the imagination of a Kant, when contemplating 
the starry heavens. The Origine des Fables and 
the Histoire des Oracles are masterpieces of quiet 
malice. He tells us in the Origine des Fables that 
the history of all nations, Greeks, Gauls, Romans, 
Americans and Chinese, begins with fables . . . ' all 
nations, that is, except the Chosen People, among 
whom a special attention of Providence has pre- 
served the truth.' Here the very qualification 
which saves the orthodoxy of the statement is 
made to gently insinuate its own improbability. 
In the Histoire des Oracles, a work adapted from 
the Dutch of one Van Dale, he establishes that the 
Pagan oracles were not the work of demons, and 
did not cease at the death of Christ. The thesis 
seems innocent enough, but Fontenelle's treatment 
of it leaves the reader with the conviction that 
demons and oracles of every kind are more than 
suspicious : a conviction which he must be slow- 
witted indeed not to be inclined to apply to Rome 
as much as to Delphi. Yet nothing has been said 
that would formally justify such a conclusion. 
Certainly his attack on revelation lost nothing in 
acuteness for being disguised under the mantle of 
an exquisitely pudic orthodoxy that shrank from 
the contagion of superstition. 



22 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Fontenelle reaches his greatest height of para- 
doxical brilliancy in his well-known Dialogues des 
Morts, published in 1686. Of this book Voltaire 
wrote to Frederic in 1 75 1, ' Le defaut de Fon- 
tenelle, c'est qu'il veut toujours avoir de l'esprit. 
C'est toujours lui qu'on voit, et jamais ses heros ; 
il leur fait dire le contraire de ce qu'ils devraient 
dire, il soutient le pour et le contre, il ne veut que 
briller.' Was that, after all, so grave a fault, good 
Master ? And does the criticism come well from the 
author of Saul and other historical facdties ? How- 
ever we may explain this unfavourable judgment, 
and there is more than one alternative to its being 
the expression of unbiassed opinion, it remains a fact 
that Voltaire himself never wrote anything wittier 
than these imaginary conversations. Their verve 
is inimitable, and never flags for a moment, there is 
not a dull line in all the forty. Fontenelle chooses 
the most delightfully incongruous companions for 
the discussion of every subject under the sun. 
Faustina proves to Brutus that her conduct to 
Marcus Aurelius was of a most disinterested de- 
scription and was dictated by the very same motives 
which led Brutus to murder his friend. Erasti- 
trates, a physician of antiquity, considerably damps 
the enthusiasm of Harvey, over the benefits which 
his discovery has conferred on mankind, by the 
remark that he does not observe any diminution in 



FONTENELLE 23 

the number of annual arrivals on the shores of 
Styx. Socrates explains to Montaigne that anti- 
quity was a poor affair after all, and that there 
were just as many fools and knaves in the Athens 
of his day, as in the Paris which Montaigne knew. 
The Dialogues gives us the answer to the ques- 
tion of Fontenelle's scepticism. As we have seen, 
he was no sceptic in matters of religion, being 
definitely anti-religious on positive grounds ; nor 
was he a sceptic in what he called experimental 
philosophy, i.e. science, where he found indeed his 
one point of certitude. Where he was a sceptic 
was in morals. Not that he doubted that the 
guidance of reason was what men required in order 
to be good and happy, but he more than suspected 
that the nature of things did not in fact permit 
such a result, except in so small a minority of cases 
as to leave the world, in the main, a stage for 
knaves and fools. The wise should be encouraged 
to get what amusement they could from the spec- 
tacle. He used to say in later years, that the 
amount of enthusiasm around him frightened him. 
The important thing to note about this tempera- 
mental attitude — for, although he may have sup- 
ported it by argument, it was that an fond — is its 
difference from that of the second generation of 
the eighteenth century, of the philosophers who 
carried the movement of emancipation into the 



24 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

political sphere. One sees the sort of imaginary 
dialogue which Fontenelle would have put on the 
lips of, say, Turgot and Machiavelli. 

His other important work is his Mdmoires of the 
Academy of the Sciences, of which he was per- 
petual secretary. It was one of his duties to write 
doges of the deceased academicians. For once 
Cydias becomes almost enthusiastic and really elo- 
quent. He realised the dignity and beauty of 
these workers' lives, and he makes us feel them 
in a series of short biographies which really can 
hardly be too highly praised. The simple virtues 
of these great men, their probity, their immense 
and peaceful labours, their delightful piety, like 
that of Ozanan, who said it belonged to the Sor- 
bonne to dispute, to the Pope to decide, and to the 
mathematician to go to Heaven in a perpendicular 
straight line ; or their simplicity, like that of the 
great chemist who said of the Regent : ' Je le 
connais, j'ai frequente dans son laboratoire. Oh, 
c'est un rude travailleur ! ' — all the features of their 
blameless existences are lovingly and carefully 
detailed. We are surprised to find another Fon- 
tenelle, very different to the author of the Dialogues 
des Moris, a Fontenelle who does not sneer, who 
has almost forgotten to be epigrammatic. Almost, 
but not quite. We are told that M. Dodart 
■ accompagnait de toutes les lumieres de la raison 



FONTENELLE 25 

la respectable obscurite de la foi.' Science had 
seized him, and having seized him never let him 
go. His nimble brain moved easily in what he 
called experimental philosophy. And it is in his 
services to science — not the services of an inde- 
pendent discoverer, but the no less necessary ones 
of the writer who familiarises the world with the 
results obtained by specialists in their laboratory 
or at their telescope — that his real contribution to 
his time and the transitional movement of his time 
consists. He died happily and peacefully, aged 
ninety-nine years and eleven months, with the 
characteristic words on his lips: 'Jeprouve une 
difficulte d'etre.' And the Academie des Sciences 
has never had such a good secretary since. 



26 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 



PROSPER MERIMEE 

The centenary of Prosper Merimee four years ago, 
passed practically unnoticed, which is perhaps what 
that eminent person, who had an almost comical 
horror of popular appreciation, would have liked. 
One can imagine the sort of letter he would have 
written on September 27, 1903, to some 'Unknown 
Friend ' among the shades in description of the 
celebration of his memory, if, in fact, his com- 
patriots had remembered him. As it is, they 
saved him the trouble. ' A few words ' were mur- 
mured by that veteran Professor of the Sorbonne, 
M. Emile Faguet, an article appeared here and 
there in the French press, but these voices had 
little, if any, echo. Perhaps the official world of 
M. Combes was detached from such purely 
academic interests. The fact is that Merimde, 
alive or dead, is not available for the objects of 
popular propaganda. Both as a man and as an 
artist his appeal was, and still is, to a small circle. 
It may be worth our while to try and discover in 
what the value of that appeal consists. 



PROSPER m£RXM£E 27 

The extreme conscientiousness and integrity of 
soul of the artist renders it justifiable to seek that 
value not only in his written word. Merimee's 
personality was a work of art as sincerely con- 
ceived, as deftly composed, as logically worked out 
as any of his own stories. So his personality may 
come, in fairness, to be considered as more than an 
essential element in — rather as one, and that an 
essential aspect of — his contribution, the 'moi 
haissable ' (so great an artist was he in life as well 
as letters), being as dexterously concealed in the 
daily habit of the man of the world, the mondain, 
as in the pages of the writer. 

It would doubtless have annoyed him exces- 
sively to be told that the key to the success with 
which he handled such a multiplicity and com- 
plexity of interests, was to be found in the pages 
of the Imitation of Christ ; yet few men have 
carried out so consistently the exhortation, ' Sibi 
unitus et simplificatus esse.' I shall therefore 
make no apology for adopting here a method of 
criticism which is, in most cases, rightly held to be 
illegitimate. Artistic creation is nearly always a 
special function of the brain, and, for the most 
part, unrelated, at least obviously, to the rest of the 
artist's life. 

Prosper Merimee was born a hundred years ago 
on September 28th. His father, Jean-Francois 



28 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Leonor, was a painter of mediocre quality who, 
after some moderate success with the brush, had 
intelligence enough to recognise his own calibre 
and to resign the practice of painting for its study. 
He became professor at the Ecole Polytechnique 
and Secretary of the Ecole des Beaux- Arts. He 
was the author of a history of oil painting, and 
spent much of his time in his laboratory experi- 
menting on the chemical constituents of colours. 
Jean-Francois, when in middle life, met in a pension, 
where he gave lessons, a girl named Anna Moreau, 
neither rich nor beautiful, whom he married. The 
mother of Prosper would seem to have been a 
remarkable woman. M. Filon describes her as 
1 un caractere ferme, un esprit prompt, de nature 
seche et gaie.' He adds that she was peacefully 
and invincibly irreligious, the reverse of senti- 
mental, and very faithful to her duties and her 
affections. She painted with some skill, and was 
a fascinating raconteuse. Her portraits of children 
gained her a certain reputation, and are said to 
have owed part of their success to the way in 
which she fixed the attention of her young models 
by the delightful stories with which she would 
beguile the hours of sitting. In a word, she was 
just the mother indicated for Merimee on Schopen- 
hauer's theory of heredity. At least it would 
appear that Prosper inherited his brain from her ; 



PROSPER MERIMEE 29 

and that not merely in the sense of intellectual 
power alone, but also in the whole turn and cast of 
his mind. In her we see his love of anecdote 
(his best work consists really of exquisitely fin- 
ished anecdote), his horror of sentimentality, of 
pleiimicherie, his aversion to religion of all kinds. 

In 182 1 Francois Merimee wrote to his friend 
Fabre, a painter of Montpellier, who had succeeded 
Alfieri in the affections of the Countess of Albany : 
' J'ai un grand fils de dix-huit ans dont je voudrais 
bien faire un avocat . . . toujours dlevd a la 
maison, il a de bonnes mceurs et de Instruction.' 

Reading for the Bar in Paris, as in London, is 
not incompatible with other and more romantic 
interests, and the future Academician found time 
to make many literary friends. J. J. Ampere and 
Albert Stapfer were among his intimates. Stapfer 
was an interesting and charming person, the son 
of the Swiss minister. He represented a type far 
too rare among us to-day, though frequently to be 
met with a hundred years ago, being indeed a 
survival from the eighteenth century. Endowed 
with considerable literary ability, he seems to have 
lacked personal ambition or the desire for money, 
and was content to remain a spectator of the 
battles of letters, excelling in intimacy as a wise 
critic and brilliant talker. Such men are the salt 
of society ; in the eighteenth century they alone 



30 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

constituted the literary 'public' Merimee used to 
frequent the house of Stapfer's father, now retired 
from diplomacy and definitely settled in Paris in 
the midst of the intellectual society he loved. 

Here the 'jeunes' used to assemble. While 
their elders counted their honours at whist, they 
would gather in a corner round a stout, dark, 
square-faced man with little flaming eyes. It was 
no less a personage than Stendhal. Sometimes 
his hearers were distracted by the fluent rhetoric 
of a young professor of philosophy, Victor Cousin, 
on which occasions the great man would grunt 
with impatience and growl forth the characteristic 
appreciation : ' Depuis Bossuet personne n'a joue 
de la blague serieuse comme cet homme-la ! ' 

And here we must dwell for a moment on the 
influence of Stendhal over Merimee, who, fortu- 
nately, has left us an invaluable document on his 
one and only master. These few pages on Henri 
Beyle in his Portraits Historiques et Littdraires, 
tell us quite as much about their writer as their 
subject. Our criticisms of our friends not un- 
frequently represent the reactions they produce in 
ourselves, unconsciously objectified. Merimee in 
the particular case has admitted as much to one 
of his unknown correspondents, though he has 
declared in his published study of Stendhal that, 
except for certain literary preferences and aver- 



PROSPER MERIMEE 31 

sions, they had scarcely an idea in common. That 
this should have been so, at least at the moment 
of their first meeting in 1820, is not surprising, 
Beyle being then about forty, and Merimee barely 
eighteen. 

Beyle's formula is somewhat complex. A true 
disciple of the eighteenth century, of Diderot and 
the Encyclopaedists, he was nevertheless the father 
of French nineteenth-century literature and the 
authentic founder of the Romantic movement. 
Victor Hugo did but invent the mediaeval staging 
that gave that movement its vogue in the drawing- 
rooms of the Restoration, and it was the splendour 
of his genius that caused the play to become identi- 
fied with the scenery in the public imagination. 
There was no necessary connection between the 
ideals of Christianity and the Romantic movement. 
Indeed the spirit of its founder was emphatically 
anti-Christian in the eighteenth-century manner of 
D'Alembert, Condorcet, and Voltaire. The move- 
ment was primarily a reaction against the conven- 
tions which had enslaved the French drama, and, 
so far, represented the claim of literature to find 
its value in a true observation and sincere render- 
ing of human life. To be a 'Romantic' in 1824 
meant that one despised the sacred ' Unities,' that 
one laughed at the Abbe Auger ; that one had the 
temerity to find Racine conventional and unsatis- 



32 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

fying. Beyle's pamphlet, Racine and Shakespeare, 
in which the latter poet's truthfulness of observa- 
tion, and daring disregard of the axioms of a 
pedantic classicism are contrasted with the former's 
rhetorical representation of the life of the passions 
in a passionless vacuum of abstraction, was the 
manifesto of the first period of the Romantic 
movement, as the preface of Hugo's Cromwell 
was of the second. 

A foolish person once asked Beyle his pro- 
fession. ' Observateur du cceur humain,' replied 
the novelist ; and it is said that the foolish person 
fled, convinced that the reply was a euphemism 
for police-spy. The phrase certainly stands not 
unfitly on the threshold of the nineteenth century, 
as the formula of nearly all that century's literary 
production. To it may be attached not only the 
works of the Romantics properly so-called, but the 
1 roman de mceurs,' the psychological novel, and 
the labours of the self-styled naturalists. In per- 
sonal character Beyle seems to have been a 
puzzling mass of contradictions. He claimed to 
be always guided by ' la Log'ique ' (as he empha- 
sised the word in pronunciation), but never, 
according to Merimee, was there a more impulsive 
and spontaneous creature. He imagined that he 
had discovered his ideal of passion (up to which 
he lived as well as wrote, in Italy). He had 



J 



PROSPER MERIM^E 33 

doubtless found there abundant materials for its 
incarnation, but the ideal is as old and universal 
as the l Fall.' His views on this subject were, 
in fact, as elementary as they well could be in 
a civilised man, and his appreciation of women 
was precisely on a par with his criticism of 
religion. As to the latter, whatever they might 
say, the professors of all forms of religion were 
necessarily hypocrites. His curious belief in the 
absolute equality of the human mind precluded the 
charitable alternative — fools. The parallel may 
be left to complete itself. It is nevertheless fair 
to note that the experience which was to Beyle 
the crown of life — ' Beyle croyait qu'il n'y avait de 
bonheur possible en ce monde que pour un homme 
amoureux,' writes Merimee — was always to him 
psychological and emotional rather than purely 
physical ; it was always love — of sorts — not vice. 
In all this he was a true child of the eighteenth 
century. That century dealt invariably in absolute 
judgments. Austere philosophers like d'Alem- 
bert and Condorcet would have endorsed Beyle's 
religious views, and would have had, at least, a 
theoretic sympathy with his attitude in sexual 
matters. As regards the criticism of religions, 
the glimmerings of a genuine historical method 
had not dawned on their consciousness, and the 
Christian theory of continence, which they re- 

c 



34 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

garded not altogether unjustifiably as in practice 
the supreme hypocrisy of the Church, was to them 
a very /3Se\i;y/xa tt}s iprjfjLOJcreajs of the human spirit. 

It is easy to point out the insufficiency of the 
anti-religious dogmatism of the Encyclopaedists. 
Here, however, we are not concerned with philo- 
sophy for its own sake, but only as a social 
element in reaction. 

The cataclysm of the Revolution had buried the 
ancien regime, and with it, for a time at least, the 
lofty hopes which had animated many of the 
thinkers who had unconsciously done most to 
render possible that time of terror. The Napo- 
leonic epic intoxicated the opening years of the 
new century with a chalice of blood and glory : 
Europe awoke sceptical and weary after the 
double nightmare. And France, who had given 
this terrible object-lesson to the rest of the world, 
was no less disillusioned. Now Merim6e was a 
prince of ' desillusionnes.' 

Sainte-Beuve heard from the lips of Madame 
Merimee an anecdote of Prosper's childhood which 
seemed to him to givt the key to his character. 
He committed some childish fault at the age of 
five, which induced his mother to place him en 
pdnitence outside the door of the studio where she 
was working. Through the door the child im- 
plored her pardon, making the most convincing 



PROSPER M&RIM&E 35 

protestations of contrition. His mother paid no 
attention. At last he opened the door, and 
dragged himself towards her on his knees in so 
grotesquely pathetic an attitude that she could 
not prevent herself bursting into laughter. He 
changed his tone, and said, rising : ' Eh bien, 
puisqu'on se moque de moi, je ne demanderai 
jamais plus pardon ! ' He kept, says Sainte-Beuve, 
his resolution only too well. And his fidelity to it 
was the true source of his profound irony. Years 
afterwards Sainte-Beuve added to his note of 
the anecdote a last reflection : ' S'il avait su le 
Grec a cet age, il aurait pu prendre la devise qu'il 
porta gravee sur un cachet : Mifivrjcr amo-reii/, 
Souviens-toi de mener.' 

We may accept the story for what it may be 
worth, not forgetting that distrust of men and 
things was in the psychological climate into which 
Merimee was born. Kant seemed to have clipped 
for ever the wings of philosophy; post- Kantian 
idealism had not yet attained its droit de citd in the 
commonwealth of European thought, and if it had, 
it may be doubted whether so cautious and cool a 
head as Merimee's would have yielded to its seduc- 
tions. The apparently appalling results of popular 
enthusiasm in the holiest of all causes — the cause 
of them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of 
death — had not been such as to encourage confi- 



36 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

dence in the immanent forces at work in the human 
process. The old comely universe over which, 
with benedictory episcopal hands, the ' Pater de 
ccelis Deus' of Christian tradition had presided, on 
the whole benignly, was swept away, and the 
promise of the new Heaven and Earth was but a 
faltering one at best. In that old world where, in 
spite of superficial disruptions, such as Black Deaths 
and Thirty Years' Wars, all was really secure, 
steadied by the Arms of the Eternal, it had been 
possible, it had come to many naturally, to live 
gracious and dignified lives of unremitting toil, 
serenely confident in a providential disposition of 
the fruits of their labours. 

The ' fruits of philosophy ' had just recently been 
bitter in the mouths of Frenchmen of that day. 
Reaction or disillusion seemed the only alternatives 
that lay before them. As a matter of fact Merim6e 
resigned himself to both. The stifling of French 
liberties by Louis Napoleon's coup d£tat awoke no 
protest from him, and he became a Senator of that 
prince's short-lived Empire and Inspector of 
National Monuments, while his art, as we shall 
now proceed to see, was based on profound dis- 
illusion. Disillusion is a term which depends for 
its value on its context ; it may mean gain or loss ; 
what was the balance in the case of Merimee ? 

He was born into a society but recently emanci- 



PROSPER MERIMEE 37 

pated from the most effective and complete system 
of religious idealisation that the world has ever 
seen. There was no part of life to which that 
system did not extend, no human emotion which it 
had not made its own — for good or for ill. Not 
only by its own supreme emotional quality had it 
seized and retained the emotions, but by means of 
its transcendental values it had enormously increased 
their momentum in certain directions. The three 
fundamental theological virtues had dilated the 
psychological capacity of man to an extent that 
would have seemed impossible to a pre-Christian 
thinker. Infinite Truth as the possession of Faith, 
infinite bliss as the object of Hope, infinite love as 
the reward of Charity — such and no less formed 
the inalienable birthright of every member of the 
Catholic Church. We are not concerned here with 
theology or philosophy, and we may therefore note 
without further comment that, as a matter of fact, 
whatever its explanation, the prestige of that august 
conception of human destiny had become, in the 
opening years of the nineteenth century, very dim. 
Voltaire was not a final solvent of the claims of 
ecclesiastical authority, but, for the moment, he 
was an exceedingly effective one. Disillusion 
necessarily ensued, and it reached a depth of 
which the height of Christian aspiration furnished 
the measure. 



_ ^ 



38 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

It is true that Merimee did not himself suffer the 
personal disillusion of the loss of belief. But 
generations of Christian heredity were behind him, 
and there is no doubt that the close reserve and 
impassivity of manner that made him resemble ' un 
Anglais, sauf le sourire,' says Taine, were the mask 
of a profoundly sensitive and emotional nature. 
His voluminous correspondence with his 'amies' 
reveals, as we shall see, an affectionate and tender 
temperament at which he himself was the first to 
mock. 

Born into that clear dry air of rationalism, in 
which propositions crackle defiantly like pistol 
shots, his nature lacked the environment necessary 
for emotional expansion. So his view of life came 
to be based on a mistrust of emotional values, and 
also, it must be added, of those intellectual general- 
isations which many of them seem to imply. It 
must further be noted that Merimee did not 
replace any of the lost illusions. He was not of 
those who believe the more ardently in humanity 
when they have lost their faith in God, who find 
their ideal on earth when Heaven has melted away. 
No ; he lived contentedly, stoically at least, on the 
fine edge of complete disillusion : — 

Veut-on savoir sa conception de la vie ? II l'enfermait 
dans une farce profonde qu'il a repetee plusieurs fois dans 
ses lettres. ' Arlequin tombait du cinquieme etage. 



PROSPER MERIMEE 39 

Comme il passait a la hauteur du troisieme, on lui demanda 
comment il se trouvait.' ' Tres-bien, pourvu que cela 
dure.' La vie est une chute. D'ou tombons-nous et ou 
tombons-nous ? On ne sait. Dans une seconde nous 
aurons les reins casses, mais on est si bien en 1'air ! 

Complete detachment from any dogmatic belief 
— nay, the passionate rejection of any such mental 
bonds — has not infrequently been allied with a 
highly sensitive religious temperament. Amiel is 
a case in point ; he is, in fact, the prototype of such 
souls. Merimee was, it must be owned, openly 
irreligious — ' impie,' as the French say. Beyle, 
who delighted in being called the ' personal enemy 
of Providence,' had cultivated with complete success 
the elements of irreligion which his disciple had 
learnt, in the first instance, at his mothers knee. 
His philosophy was the pure materialism of Holbach 
and Helvetius ; there were no half-tones, the set- 
ting sun had left no twilight behind. As the years 
and he grew grey together, he came, in a measure, 
to modify his attitude, although the fact that he 
did so was unknown, save to one, until the year 
1897, when Une Correspondance Inddite was pub- 
lished in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 

His correspondent in this series of letters was a 
deeply religious woman, and Merimee was much 
attached to her. Her friendship brought out a side 
of his nature, little suspected by the librarian 



40 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Panizzi and Mile. Jenny Dacquin, the recipient of 
the first Lettres a une Inconnue. In these pages 
we have a Merimee who has made a careful study 
of the Gospels, who regrets his conscientious 
inability to accept Christianity, who can reach the 
point of saying : ' Dieu me semble tres probable, et 
le commencement de l'Evangile de Saint Jean n'a 
rien qui me repugne. ' But, so far as we know, except 
for the clause in his will directing prayers to be 
said at his grave by a Protestant minister, which 
looks suspiciously like a last stroke aimed at the 
religion of his country, or may have been perhaps 
a courteous concession to the feelings of the two 
devoted English ladies who nursed him on his 
deathbed, these vellditds of belief never reached 
the consistency of a permanent mood or translated 
themselves into action. 

Merimee's literary contribution at first sight 
seems rather the product of the leisure of an 
accomplished man of the world than that of a pro- 
fessional man of letters. An accomplished man of 
the world he certainly was, wearing his immense 
learning with unobtrusive grace, willing to devote 
his time and erudition to making a success of 
country-house theatricals, devoted to little girls and 
cats, between which branches of the animal kingdom 
he maintained the existence of a mysterious affinity, 
a delightful companion, attractive as it would seem 



PROSPER MfiRIMfiE 41 

by a singular dispensation, to men and women and 
children alike — he was all this, but he was more 
also. """ He possessed a very special and individual 
view of art, which he was fortunate enough to be 
able to express almost perfectly. Indeed, his style, 
given his self-imposed limitations, is practically 
perfect, the only possible criticism on it being that 
the routine of its bland impeccability gives at times 
the suggestion of something inhuman. x Never to 
make mistakes is surely to be more or less than 
man. And, in truth, his view of life of which his 
style is so perfect an equivalent — here, if ever, le 
style cest r/tomme — was not that of one who is him- 
self involved in its delicious and absurd complica- 
tions, its foolish tragedies, its comedies of tears. 
In his writings, if not in his life, he stands per- 
manently aloof from the passions which he paints 
so perfectly. Never for an instant is he betrayed 
into partisanship for any of his puppets. Jose 
Lizarrabengoa and the Spanish gipsy, Arsene 
Guillot and Mme. de Piennes, Julie de Chavarny, 
Saint-Clair, the Abbe Aubain, Colomba, Don Juan 
de Marana, types terrible, pathetic, humorous, flit 
across his purified vision, which remains intent 
only on noting the beauty of their ever-changing 
combinations as they pass. His attitude is that of 
the eternal spectator, of the God whom Mephisto- 
pheles revealed to Doctor Faustus. That deity 



42 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

was no doubt immoral, and, from the human point 
of view which judges deities, so far, unsatisfactory. 
But to be an immoral God is the achievement of 
the artist. 

Flaubert has left behind him his ideal of perfect 
anonymity, of the entire self-suppression of the 
writer in his creation. It was just this that Merimee 
attained so supremely. 

Take, for instance, the following passage from 
that flawless piece of work, Carmen : — 

Elle avait un jupon rouge fort court qui laissait voir 
des bas de soie blancs avec plus d'un trou, et des souliers 
mignons de maroquin rouge attaches avec des rubans 
couleur de feu. Elle ecartait sa mantille afin de montrer 
ses epaules et un gros bouquet de cassie qui sortait de sa 
chemise. Elle avait encore une fleur de cassie dans le 
coin de la bouche, et elle s'avancait en se balancant sur 
ses hanches comme une pouliche du haras de Cordoue. 
Dans mon pays une femme en ce costume aurait oblige^ 
le monde a se signer. A Seville chacun lui adressait 
quelque compliment gaillard sur sa tournure ; elle repon- 
dait a chacun, faisant des yeux en coulisse, le poing sur 
la hanche, erTrontee comme une vraie bohemienne qu'elle 
etait. D'abord elle ne me plut pas, et je repris mon 
ouvrage ; mais elle, suivant Tusage des femmes et des 
chats qui ne viennent pas quand on les appelle et qui 
viennent quand on ne les appelle pas, s'arreta devant moi 
et m'adressa la parole : ' Compere,' me dit-elle, a la facon 
andalouse, ' veux-tu me donner ta chaine pour tenir les 
clefs de mon coffre-fort ? ' — ' C'est pour attacher mon epin- 
glette/ lui repondis-je. — ( Ton epinglette ! ' secria-t-elle en 
riant. ( Ah, Monsieur fait de la dentelle, puisqu'il a besoin 






PROSPER MERIMEE 43 

d'epingles ! ' Tout le monde qui etait la se mit a rire, et 
moi je me sentais rougir, et je ne pouvais trouver rien a. 
lui repondre. 'Allons, mon cceur,' reprit-elle, 'fais-moi 
sept aunes de dentelle noire pour une mantille, epinglier 
de mon ame ! ' et, prenant la fleur de cassie qu'elle avait 
a la bouche, elle me la lanca, d'un mouvement de pouce, 
juste entre les deux yeux. Monsieur, cela me fit 1'effet 
d'une balle qui m'arrivait. . . . Je ne savais ou me fourrer, 
je demeurais immobile comme une planche. Quand elle 
fut entree dans te. manufacture, je vis la fleur de cassie 
qui etait tombee a tcrre entre mes pieds ; je ne sais ce qui 
me prit, mais je la ramassai sans que mes camarades s'en 
apercussent et je la mis precieusement dans ma veste. 
Premiere sottise ! 

What splendid objectivity of treatment is here ! 
How grandly the scene moves towards its con- 
clusion — the treasuring of the flower from Carmen's 
wilful red mouth — and how deftly that conclusion 
sums up, in a gesture of self-committal, the process 
in the speaker's mind, never described, but thus 
inevitably revealed. 

Such revelation of character compressed into a 
trait, fixed in a passing gesture, struck, as it were, 
once for all, in the clear outline of an antique medal, 
is the secret of his power of narrative. The daily 
actions of human beings are in great measure dis- 
tressingly irrelevant ; three parts of what we say 
and do does not really belong to us — it is more 
external to us than our clothes, being but the half- 
conscious reproduction in the mirror of the mind of 



44 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

what we see and hear around us. To discern amid 
this baffling whirl of quasi-automatic reaction the 
really significant 'Word,' the authentic movement 
of the conscious soul with all its most distant, most 
secret implications, and so to express all this that 
it reveal itself clearly, finally, with that inevitability 
of phrase which is the only hall-mark of true literary 
expression, is to be a great artist. Merimee's 
reputation might well rest on this scene of the 
meeting of Don Jose and Carmen. 

Nothing is further from his mind than any general 
philosophy of life. ' La metaphysique me plait,' he 
writes to a correspondent, ' parceque cela ne finit 
jamais.' He is content with the concrete episode 
and confines himself to tracing the psychological 
connections of moods. In this way, however, he 
becomes a philosopher, malgrd lui. Into the 
hundred pages of Carmen has gone the whole of 
Schopenhauer's metaphysic of Love and Death. 
Arsene Guillot is worth many learned treatises on 
popular religion and the psychology of the courtesan. 
Very significant too is his choice of subject. He 
seems not to have been much interested in those 
refinements and complications which increasing 
civilisation has worked into the woof of our passions. 
In this respect he and Mr. Henry James are at the 
antipodes of art. His characters are all quite 
simple, or at least their complexity does not go 



PROSPER M£RIM£E 45 

beyond the barely-veiled cunning of the savage. 
They are so dominated by the passion that leads 
them up to the dramatic issue of the story as to 
appear at times to be but embodiments of it. Not 
that they ever become mere abstract types. They 
are filled in with a wealth of detail, of plausible 
circumstantiality which makes them breathe full- 
blooded before us. Their hands grow hot or cold 
in ours, as we meet them at some tragic parting of 
their ways. 

But everywhere and always they are puppets at 
the mercy of fate, and the cords with which their 
destiny at last strangles them, are twined out of 
their own passionate, wilful hearts. Life is a force 
— a ' Force Ennemie ' — which sweeps them on to the 
inevitable doom of human consciousness in such 
conditions. 

The tragic simplicity of his characters is matched 
by the simplicity of the issues with which he prefers 
to deal. Just as they are among the least intro- 
spective of the great creations of fiction, so these 
issues are of the plainest and most direct. Love, 
jealousy, revenge, unchecked by philosophy or 
religion, form the staple of his matter. There is 
hardly one of his tales that does not involve more 
than one violent death. Appropriately he chooses 
his mise-en- scene among Andalusian gipsies, or in 
the brigand-infested maquis of Corsica, or in wild 



46 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Lithuanian forests, where sorceresses dwell. The 
naive immorality of his personages finds thus a 
congruous setting. For, in truth, Merimee paints 
pre-moral man before he had fully emerged from 
the womb of his great Mother ' red in tooth and 
claw.' 

Of the subsequent process by which, in patient 
length of centuries, reason developed with its 
derivatives, religion and civilisation, of the slow, 
gradual formation of other than purely egotistic 
values, he has little, if anything, to say : these 
things do not interest him, they do not possess the 
dramatic quality which he seeks. Of the world of 
inner tragedy of a Hamlet or a St. Augustine he 
knows nothing. 

One of his most powerful stories, Colomba, 
possesses in a high degree this sombre beauty of a 
humanity that we still feel stirring in the recesses 
of our inherited being. 

Colomba is a Corsican maiden who is a living 
incarnation of the dominant passion of her island 
race. The one duty of Corsicans is revenge. 
They do not seem to have reached, at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, that stage of civil 
development known as the law for composition of 
blood. So strict is their devotion to duty that one 
wonders how their bloodthirsty stock has survived. 
They have come to take a disinterested pleasure in 



PROSPER M£RIM£E 47 

the performance of these sinister actions for their 
own sake in virtue of a well-known law of social 
development. One Pietri dies an exceptional and 
natural death. His son exclaims at his father's 
funeral : ' Oh, pourquoi n'es-tu pas mort de la 
malemort (mala morte) ? Nous t'aurions veng£ ! ' 
And one feels his regret to be excusable, indeed 
inevitable. 

Colomba's father has been treacherously mur- 
dered about a year before the opening of the story. 
She suspects the hand of a rival family, the Barra- 
cini, who are, however, able to exculpate themselves 
legally. One may imagine how much value that 
has in Colomba's eyes. So she sets to work aided 
by two friendly brigands, who live concealed — 
latitanti, as Italians still say of their descendants 
to-day — in the jungle or maquis that covers more 
than half the island, to weave the web of evidence. 
She discovers a forgery here, there an altered date 
in the documents on which the Barracini relied to 
prove their innocence. Her case complete, she 
hands over the sacred charge to her brother, an 
officer in the French army. Ors' Anton, however, 
has imbibed the prejudices of civilisation during a 
prolonged residence on the Continent. He doubts 
his sister's evidence, and, in any case, would be for 
legal proceedings. A degenerate indeed ! 

A un demi-mille du village, apres bien des detours, 



48 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Colomba s'arreta tout-a-coup dans un endroit ou le 
chemin faisait un coude. La s'elevait une petite pyramide 
de branchages, les uns verts, les autres desseches, amon- 
celes a la hauteur de trois pieds environ. Du sommet on 
voyait percer l'extremite d'une croix de bois peinte en 
noir. Dans plusieurs cantons de la Corse, surtout dans 
les montagnes, un usage extremement ancien, et qui se 
rattache peut-etre a des superstitions du paganisme, 
oblige les passants a jeter une pierre ou un rameau d'arbre, 
sur le lieu ou un homme a peri de mort violente. Pen- 
dant de longues annees, aussi longtemps que le souvenir 
de sa fin tragique demeure dans la memoire des hommes, 
cette orTrande singuliere s'accumule de jour en jour. On 
appelle cela l'amas, le mucchio d'un tel. Colomba s'arreta 
devant ce tas de feuillage, et arrachant une branche 
d'arbousier l'ajouta a la pyramide. 

1 Orso,' dit-elle, 'c'est ici que notre pere est mort. Prions 
pour son ame, mon frere ! ' et elle se mit a genoux. Orso 
l'imita aussitot. En ce moment la cloche du village tinta 
lentement, car un homme etait mort dans la nuit. Orso 
fondit en larmes. 

Au bout de quelques minutes Colomba se leva, rceil 
sec, mais la figure animee. Elle fit du pouce a la hate le 
signe de croix familier a ses compatriotes et qui accom- 
pagne d'ordinaire leurs serments solennels ; puis, entrai- 
nant son frere, elle reprit le chemin du village. lis ren- 
trerent en silence dans leur maison. Orso monta dans sa 
chambre. Un instant apres Colomba Yy suivit, portant 
une petite cassette qu'elle posa sur la table. Elle 1'ouvrit 
et en tira une chemise couverte de larges taches de sang. 

1 Voici la chemise de votre pere, Orso,' et elle le jeta sur 
ses genoux. 

'Voici le plomb qui Pa frappe,' et elle posa sur la 
chemise deux balles oxydees. 

1 Orso, mon frere ! ' cria-t-elle en se precipitant dans ses 



PROSPER MERIMEE 49 

bras et l'etreignant avec force, ' Orso ! tu le vengeras ! ' et 
elle l'embrassa avec une espece de fureur, baisa les balles 
et la chemise, et sortit de la chambre, laissant son frere 
comme petrifie sur sa chaise. 

Colomba's designs are at last crowned with 
success. After a meeting, for purposes of recon- 
ciliation, with the Barracini (insisted on by the 
prefet), at which they are convicted of perjury 
and corruption on the evidence of a bandit, called 
M. le Cure, the two sons of the Barracini lie in 
wait for Orso and attempt to assassinate him. He 
kills them both in self-defence. The twelve-year- 
old niece of the bandit, Chilina, carries the news to 
Colomba and satisfies her of her brother's safety. 

1 Les autres ! ' demanda Colomba d'une voix rauque. 
Chillina fit le signe dela croix avec l'index et le doigt du 
milieu. Aussitot une vive rougeur succeda, sur la figure 
de Colomba, a sa paleur mortelle. Elle jeta un regard 
ardent sur la maison des Barracini, et dit en souriant a 
ses notes : ' Rentrons prendre le cafe.' 

That ' Rentrons prendre le cafe ' is magnificent ! 

The description of the procession bringing home 
to their father, the bodies of the young Barracini is 
like a piece of an antique frieze. 

Le jour etait deja fort avance lorsqu'une triste proces- 
sion entra dans le village. On rapportait a l'avocat 
Barracini les cadavres de ses enfants, chacun couche en 
travers d'une mule que conduisait un paysan. Une foule 
de clients et d'oisifs suivait le lugubre cortege. Avec 

D 



50 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

eux on voyait les gendarmes qui arrivent toujours trop 
tard, et l'adjoint, qui levait les bras au ciel, repetant sans 
cesse: 'Que dira M. le prefet?' Quelques femmes, 
entre autres une nourrice d'Orlanduccio, s'arrachaient les 
cheveux et poussaient des hurlements sauvages. Mais 
leur douleur bruyante produisait moins d'impression que 
le desespoir muet d'un personnage qui attirait tous les 
regards. C'etait le malheureux pere, qui allait d'un 
cadavre a l'autre, soulevait leurs tetes, souillees de terre, 
baisait leurs levres violettes, soutenait leurs membres deja 
roidis, comme pour leur eviter les cahots de la route. 
Parfois on le voyait ouvrir la bouche pour parler, mais il 
n'en sortait pas un cri, pas une parole. Toujours les yeux 
fixes sur les cadavres, il se heurtait contre les pierres, 
contre les arbres, contre tous les obstacles qu'il rencon- 
trait. 

And with this we will take leave of Colomba, 
among the most sombre and tragic of Merimee's 
creations. In constructing this type of primitive 
humanity, at once so terrifying and so beautiful, he 
returned to the primal sources of Art, for Primus 
in orbe deos fecit timor. 

Merimee was more than a writer of stories, 
though it is undoubtedly by them that he will live. 
He composed several volumes of history, published 
some admirable archaeological studies — the fruits 
of his labours as Inspector of National Monuments 
— and wrote several plays. He ' commenced 
author' as a dramatist with his Cromwell, which 
Stendhal praised highly. He followed this up 
with his imaginary Thddtre de Clara Gazul. This 



PROSPER MERIMEE 51 

volume contained several short dramas, of which 
the two best are Les Espagnols en Danemark and 
Le Ciel et L'Enfer, professing on the title-page to 
be a translation of the work of one Clara Gazul, 
• la celebre comedienne espagnole.' Such literary 
tricks were much in fashion in those days. Pro- 
bably no one was deceived, more particularly as 
the frontispiece displayed, as the portrait of the 
supposed authoress, a caricature of Merimee him- 
self in a low dress by his friend Etienne Delecluze. 
Nevertheless, the cleverness of the postiche was 
such that a Spaniard was reported to have said : 
' Yes, the translation is not bad ; but what would 
you say if you knew the original ? ' He used his 
talent for mystification still more cleverly in the La 
Guzla, which was given to the world as a collection 
of Dalmatian ballads. He has told us the circum- 
stances in a preface written in 1840. Local colour 
was the Holy Grail of the young Romantics. But 
how paint local colour without travel, and how 
travel without money ? Merimee quotes the recipe 
which he gave to his friend J. -J. Ampere : 

Racontons notre voyage, imprimons-en le recit, et avec 
la somme que cette publication nous rapportera nous irons 
voir si le pays ressemble a nos descriptions. 

Merimee invented a bard of the name of Mag- 
lanovich, whose ballads he professed to translate. 



52 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

He added numerous pseudo-philological notes, a 
pedantic dissertation on Vampires and the Evil 
Eye, and a plausible biography of the bard. This 
time the success was complete. Pouchkine, the 
Russian poet, was completely taken in, and trans- 
lated several pieces as curious specimens of the 
Illyrian genius. Merimee sums up the episode in 
a very characteristic conclusion : ' a partir de ce 
jour je fus degoute de la couleur locale, en voyant 
combien il est aise de la fabriquer.' When local 
colour fails, what remains for the sceptical 
Romantic ? 

We have seen how Merimee's scepticism affected 
his art, influencing him in his choice of subject, 
driving him back from the problems of civilisation 
to the more spontaneous interplay of passion and 
impulse in a less sophisticated humanity, driving 
him outward from the study of the soul to the 
observation of fact. That collective process of 
reason which we call civilisation was a snare useful 
for impressing the bourgeois ; equally the individual 
process which we call a human character was with- 
out intrinsic interest, and derived its value for art 
from the casual combinations into which it might 
enter with others on the stage of time. And in all 
this he was a disciple of Stendhal. But he was a 
disciple with a difference. 

Stendhal, in spite of his genius, could never tell 



PROSPER MERIMEE 53 

a story, and his style — he never revised — was both 
clumsy and careless. Merimee could not write a 
really bad sentence, and was one of the best 
raconteurs that ever lived. To the philosophy of 
Stendhal, which remained substantially his own, 
he brought a much more strictly disciplined intelli- 
gence, and, in spite of his deliberate cynicism, a 
high degree of that indefinable quality called nobility 
of heart. The lives of the two men, as well as 
their literary productions, afford evidence of this. 
The ideas of Stendhal, for instance, in the matter 
of love were so well known that the authorship of 
Casanova's Memoirs was for a short time plausibly 
attributed to him, and it may fairly be doubted 
whether he would have been in the least inclined 
to resist the impeachment of having been the hero 
of any of the adventures of that egregious Venetian. 
Merimee was also all his life an homme afemmes, 
but he was of too fine a make to find satisfaction 
in the embraces of the Venus of the coulisse or the 
carrefour. He was no saint, as the phrase is ; but 
he knew that there are at least fifty thousand ways 
of enjoying the society of women, and he was cap- 
able of pity and self-control. 

J'allais etre amoureux (he writes to an unknown cor- 
respondent) quand je suis parti pour l'Espagne. La 
personne qui a cause mon voyage n'en a jamais rien su. Si 
j'etais reste, j'aurais peut-etre fait une grande sottise, celle 



54 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

d'offrir a une femme digne de tout le bonheur dont on 
peut jouir sur la terre, de lui offrir dis-je, en echange de 
la perte de toutes ces choses qui lui etaient cheres, une 
tendresse que je sentais moi-meme tres inferieure au 
sacrifice quelle aurait peut-etre fait. 

Not all those who proclaim loudly a more romantic 
view of the matter would be capable of such gener- 
ous delicacy. 

The more intimate side of Merimee's nature, 
studiously concealed in his fiction, appears clearly 
enough in his correspondence. It is a fascinating 
compound of tenderness and mistrust, of sensitive 
pride at times overthrown by an irresistible need of 
emotional expansion and the spontaneous aban- 
donment of a deeply affectionate nature. Much 
of his sentimental life is rightly buried for ever. 
The devotional scruples of his mistress brusquely 
cut short his first liaison. His second lasted 
eighteen years — the average length of a French 
government, says M. Filon. This too came to an 
end, not on account of scruples, but because the 
beloved grew cold. Merimee suffered horribly. 
1 Mes souvenirs meme ne me restent plus,' he 
writes to a friend. He puzzles his head over the 
reasons for his mistress's change. ' Un remords 
peut-etre, mais je suis presque sur qu'il n'y a pas de 
pretre dans l'affaire.' Ah ! his enemy was Time, 
the one eternal priest who, sooner or later, washes 



PROSPER M&RIMEE 55 

away our loves and hates, our sins and our virtues 
alike. He himself had not been in this affair quite 
beyond reproach. The correspondence with Mile. 
Jenny Dacquin must have been carried on, at least 
in part, coincidently. This voluminous sheaf of 
letters, published in 1874 under the title Lettres a 
une Inconnue, reveals in Merimee a somewhat 
exigeant but truly devoted lover, and, in his corre- 
spondent, a singularly tiresome mistress. Their 
characters were too much alike for them to be 
happy. She was too much of a Merimee en femme. 
Both had the same fear of the open sea, and pre- 
ferred hugging the shores of their respective 
egotisms ; and his shore was lined with bristling 
rocks and dangerous shoals. 

1 Le bonheur lui manquait/ says Taine. If 
happiness failed him, it was not for lack of those 
external conditions which are usually held sufficient 
to produce it. He was rich, popular, successful ; 
but happiness is a subjective quality, and there was 
that in his nature which made him his own worst 
enemy. He could never let himself go. He was 
always more afraid of error than anxious for truth. 
This constant fear of deception led him perhaps 
into the greatest of all. For, in life, he was by no 
means all that he might have been, and, in Art, his 
place, though certainly of the highest, is narrow. 



56 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 



FERDINAND FABRE 

When Gibbon delicately pointed his remarks on 
the 'immorality' of the clergy during the dark 
ages, with the reflection that it was, after all, the 
virtues rather than the vices of that body which 
were dangerous to society, he went far to redeem 
himself, by anticipation, from the charge of super- 
ficiality fastened on him by the great ecclesiastical 
advocate of our day. 

At least, he thereby indicated his opinion that 
so vast a topic as the social effects of Christianity 
could not be fruitfully discussed on such a side- 
issue as the moral defects which priests may 
happen to share with their untonsured brethren. 
And although this may appear to-day a very 
obvious commonplace, it represented in the 
eighteenth century — the century of Condorcet 
and Voltaire — a degree of philosophic calm on 
the subject which too many philosophers failed 
to reach. ' Les philosophes du i8eme siecle, 
trop disposes a croire que l'homme est toujours 
et partout le meme, se figuraient volontiers les 



FERDINAND FABRE 57 

apotres comme des capucins fripons.' Yes, but 

apostles are not always and everywhere rogues, 

and the implication hardly became the men who 

were so anxious, in their turn, to try their hands at 

the regeneration of society. It is to be feared that 

even now, in our cultured midst, prepossessions of 

the same nature as those which dominated these 

powerful but one-sided thinkers are not altogether 

dead. They still flourish, for instance, in what 

Viscount Morley once amiably called the dregs 

of the ecclesiastical world, and, for that matter, 

of the anti-ecclesiastical world also. Nay, even 

for those who aim at the not so common virtue 

of intellectual integrity, it is by no means easy in 

the particular case to be sure of objective vision, 

of 'seeing the object as it really is,' for, it is 

hardly possible that our view of the social effects 

of Christianity should be unaffected by our view of 

Christianity itself. And that attitude is so largely 

determined, as one of the greatest and saddest of 

human geniuses has told us, by reasons of the heart 

of which the reason knows nothing. 

Attempts in the direction of such inquiry have 
frequently been made, both by the defenders 
and the opponents of Christianity. And in this 
circumstance, perhaps, lies the secret of their 
inconclusiveness. For the offices of judge and 
advocate cannot be confused without detriment 



58 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

to the verdict. Reference has already been made 
to the bigotry prevailing among the French anti- 
Christian thinkers of the eighteenth century. They 
did but take their cue from the defenders of 
orthodoxy. In England too, such hostile critics 
as Collins and Tindal were hardly more acrimoni- 
ous and foul-mouthed, than a Christian bishop like 
Warburton. 

Like modern scientific psychology, which has 
devoted itself to carrying out the programme 
indicated by Taine in the memorable words : 
* C'est a Tame que le science va se prendre,' 
the nineteenth-century novel occupied itself with 
a close scrutiny of the soul of man, so close indeed 
as sometimes to forget its artistic purpose, relapsing 
now and again into the pure science which was 
the backbone of its method. A literature based 
on Taine's programme, and guided by an insatiable 
curiosity to seek the precise measure of every 
ascertainable aspect of the contemporary soul, 
could not fail, sooner or later, to find itself 
confronted by religion. 

The way in which man worships the gods is 
surely at least as important as the way in which 
he loves ; and we know, to satiety, the value 
attributed by modern masters of the novel to 
the latter propensity. Apart, moreover, from the 
psychology of the individual, religion in its public 



FERDINAND FABRE 59 

aspect is a form of social life, and, in that capacity 
also, challenges the criticism of the modern novelist. 
Thus it seems to have come about that, under the 
influence of a spirit essentially non-religious and 
non-metaphysical, a spirit, that is, which, by 
hypothesis, abstains from absolute conclusions as 
much as from preconceived ideas, a possible 
method has been found for a fruitful criticism of 
the religious phenomenon. We cannot derive any 
precise information about religion in mid-Victorian 
England or the France of the Second Empire 
from the most careful study of the Book of 
Common Prayer or the Catechism of the Council 
of Trent, but *le petit fait bien choisi,' Trollope's 
vignettes of the Barsetshire clergy, or Fabre's 
studies of ecclesiastical life in contemporary 
France, can tell us a great deal on the subject. 
The indirect method of such criticism is also 
largely in favour of its results, for it reduces to a 
minimum, what may be called the friction of the 
critic's personality. 

1 Had I written an epic about clergymen,' says 
Trollope, * I would have taken St. Paul for my 
model ; but, describing, as I have endeavoured to 
do, such clergymen as I see around me, I could 
not venture to be transcendental/ That is to say 
that Trollope writes of the clergy as they happen 
to occur in the society in which he finds them ; they 



60 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

are described from outside as social phenomena, not 
from within as spiritual forces. It were impossible 
to consider the matter from a sounder point of view 
for the purpose in hand. 

Now the Church of England in Trollope's day 
showed to great advantage by this method of 
portraiture. Many of the country clergy were 
men of good family, not a few of them reaching 
a far higher standard of education than was 
common at that time among the English upper 
class. They were also generally men of high 
moral character ; in short they fulfilled admirably, 
on the whole, the purposes for which an established 
Church may be supposed to exist in the idea of a 
broad-minded statesman. The village spires of 
England pointed to an ideal in harmony with the 
best actual elements of the nation's life. 

The Church may have been, in Lord Beaconsfield's 
phrase, still reeling from the effects of Newman's 
secession, but the shock had not made itself felt 
much in the country cathedral chapters, nor had the 
backwash of the Tractarian movement as yet settled 
itself into the current of modern Anglo-Catholicism. 
The Anglicanism of Barchester stood serene and 
strong in the consciousness of possession, not only 
of the spiritual values demanded and appreciated 
by the consciences of the faithful, but of those 
earthly values also, which, in their secular accumu- 



FERDINAND FABRE 61 

lations, had fairly come to represent, as in fact they 
had originally expressed, the appreciation of the 
faithful. 

The Church of England stood in those days, 
for a fact ; was indeed itself a great representa- 
tive fact, — to wit, the people of England from 
a religious standpoint. To those old-fashioned 
divines, whose blameless lives Trollope paints so 
delightfully, religion was no matter of idea at 
all, it stood or fell as a fact, compact indeed of 
venerable precedent and present dignity of circum- 
stance, but still as solid and undeniable as the 
fabric of the cathedral in which they preached. 
As such they preached it, and as such their hearers 
accepted or declined it. This may not have been 
a transcendental attitude, but there was philosophy 
in it too. 

Take the scene of the bishop's death in the 
opening chapter of Barchester Towers which is 
one of truly fine comedy, in Mr. Meredith's sense 
of the word. It is also an English, an Anglican 
scene. Nowhere else on the face of the earth 
could such a scene have occurred just like that. 
Archdeacon Grantley ' certainly did desire to play 
first fiddle ; he did desire to sit in full lawn sleeves 
among the peers of the realm/ and he did desire, if 
the truth must be out, to be called ' My Lord ' by 
his reverend brethren. Innocent ambitions after 



62 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

all ! And ambitions not differing in kind from 
those of all professional men, as Trollope in the 
same chapter remarks. Very different was the 
ambition of Hildebrand. Here we may observe 
an authentic note of the Church of England of 
that day. The psychological characteristics, the 
faults and virtues of the clergy were those belong- 
ing not essentially to a priesthood but rather to all 
men indifferently. The moral eminence on which 
the clergyman stood — his ordination vows and 
Sunday preaching — made a background against 
which those characteristics were more clearly 
visible than in the case of most men, but the 
qualities themselves were common to all. The 
fact is that the Christianity of Barchester Close, 
in spite of its goodly array of dean, prebendaries, 
minor canons and vicars-choral, was, in accordance 
with the national temper of mind, emphatically 
non-sacerdotal. 

The picture of the Church of England in 
Trollope's pages represents that institution as 
reflecting the best elements of the nation's life, 
its wholesome morality, its respect for law and 
order, its love of justice combined with a singular 
inability to recognise a concrete case of injustice 
when sanctified by tradition. It must be admitted 
also that certain other elements are not wanting. 
An heroic impenetrability to ideas, a loathing of 



FERDINAND FABRE 63 

change, a pride of place and circumstance that is 
not always according to reason. But, on the 
whole, it is a great picture of a noble spiritual 
fabric which like our 'glorious constitution/ of 
which it is a part, a special aspect, points to no 
individual founder, stands for no special idea, 
but has come to be what it is through its own 
spontaneous development as representative of the 
nation's spiritual attitude, modified by, and in 
turn reacting on, the secular elements of the 
nation's growth. 

It is a far cry from the gray, peaceful, rook- 
haunted towers of Barchester to the French 
cathedral town of Lormieres ; as far as from 
the methods and the point of view of Anthony 
Trollope to those of Ferdinand Fabre. This 
powerful writer, though little known in England, 
was one of the most important minor novelists 
of the Second Empire. Indeed, one can only 
call him minor in reference to his narrow range 
of subject — (he specialised in priests) — and his 
relatively small output. Sainte-Beuve praised his 
work in the highest terms. He just missed his 
fauteuil through the theological animosities created 
by his novels. Some of the Immortals voted 
against him because his writings were anti- 
religious, and some because they were too clerical. 
Pasteur was among his opponents on the former 



64 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

ground. His personal views (if he had any) were 
never revealed by him to any one. There is a 
tale of an indiscreet journalist who, in the course 
of interviewing his widow, asked her point-blank 
what her husband's religious beliefs had been. 
He could get no answer but a silent smile. His 
youth at least was religious. Like Renan, he 
was a seminarist who discovered before it was 
too late that he had no vocation. And he cer- 
tainly retained from his training, as did Renan, 
a good deal of the priest. He handles problems 
of conduct with professional delicacy of touch, 
with a true moral sympathy, and yet, from the 
point of view of one who himself stands outside* 
the web of sorrow and passion in which weaker 
ones are entangled. You feel that he touches such 
cases tenderly, compassionately, like a physician 
of the soul. His sympathy also for those of his 
characters in whom the ecclesiastical type of virtue 
is fully developed, is clear enough. Not that 
this sympathy ever blurs his vision. In Les 
Courbezons, one of his most admirably executed 
characters, a miracle of Christian charity and pure- 
hearted devotion, creates misery all around him 
through his inability to practise such elementary 
virtues as foresight and thrift. The man's admira- 
tion for the qualities he describes so well does not 
prevent the artist seeing through and beyond them. 



FERDINAND FABRE 65 

It was partly his inability to interest himself in 
the personages of the modern novel, combined 
with the accidental circumstance of his ecclesi- 
astical training, that led Fabre to his chosen 
subject. 

1 Assurement ces personnages, — le mari, la 
femme et l'amant, — qui defraient le roman contem- 
porain, qui le defraieront peut-etre toujours, car 
les combinaisons entre ces trois facteurs sont 
imperissables comme la vie elle-meme, offraient 
un interet tres vif. Mais comment arrivait-il que 
ces combinaisons, tantot ingenieuses, tantot puis- 
santes, me laissaient froid ? . . . Dans l'Eglise au 
contraire j'etais saisi, touche tout de suite. II 
n'etait pas un detail du benitier au tabernacle, 
dans la domaine des choses, du plus humble des- 
servant au souverain pontife, dans la domaine des 
hommes, qui empreint pour moi de quelque sou- 
venir suave ou terrible, ne me remudt tete et 
cceur.' From the point of view of modern litera- 
ture the Church means the Priest ; on the priest 
then Fabre concentrated his powers of observa- 
tion and description. 

That mysterious figure, the foster-father of 
civilisation and, in turn, its bitterest enemy, is 
indeed of a nature to interest the psychological 
inquirer. A man and yet not a man, for he is 
both more and less than a man, the Catholic priest 

E 



66 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

is the true descendant of all the medicine-men 
and soothsayers of the past, as he is the most 
complete and finished expression of the idea 
which they all more or less successfully incarnated. 
That idea briefly comes to this : that the unknown 
force of the universe, the source of life from which 
we come and to which after our brief wandering 
we must return, being animated by an intelligence 
and will akin to the human, can be approached by 
us in our own interests, more humano. A priest- 
hood exists in order to regulate and assure the 
success of our commerce with the Divine Un- 
known. 

Some God or specially inspired prophet has 
established the conditions of the compact between 
men and the Divine, and priests are the appointed 
channel by which the graces of the covenant are 
secured to us. Outside their ministrations (says 
each priesthood in turn) all is uncertain. Such 
or something like it, is the idea on which every 
priesthood has been based. In addition to this 
the Catholic priest has the perfectly distinct value 
of the Christian moralist, and it is the possession 
of this ethical quality, in addition to the common 
ground of all priesthoods, that gives its special 
note, we may add, its special vigour to the hier- 
archy of the Church. For those who are suscep- 
tible to the attraction of a positive religion, 



FERDINAND FABRE 67 

who are possible clients of a priesthood, may be 
roughly divided into two classes. There are 
those who are most interested in the idea under- 
lying all priesthoods, namely the notion of some 
certain channel of communication with the un- 
known. Such as these will thrill with atavistic 
terrors at the thought of death ; they have perhaps 
done much that they would have undone, and they 
feel that no natural force exists which can do that 
for them. The claim of the Catholic priest to do 
just this — definitely, positively to forgive their sins 
at a given moment, and thereby ultimately secure 
them from the terrors of the grave,— is exactly 
what they want. They do not feel any great 
interest in the moral or spiritual process implied, 
still they wind themselves up to it under their 
confessor's direction, as a necessary condition of 
what they must have. There are others who are 
primarily drawn to the ideal life of the Church. 
Rightly or wrongly they think that that life is the 
exclusive possession of the Catholic religion. To 
secure those elements of peace and holiness they 
are quite willing to fulfil the conditions of member- 
ship imposed. So they accept without much 
thought, or any particular interest in the points 
involved, the thaumaturgic side of the system. 
Thus the net of the Kingdom of Heaven takes 
fish of more than one sort. 



68 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

If the Catholic priest were merely a priest he 
would not appeal to these more spiritually-minded 
clients ; if he were merely a moralist he would 
have no power over the superstitious sin-stricken 
multitude. As it is, he has the power of holding 
them both. In order to do this, however, he 
must do more than advance his claim ; he must 
present himself plausibly in both his capacities. 
To achieve their combination in one individual 
an altogether special system of education is neces- 
sary, which inevitably results in the formation of 
a very special and peculiar character. It is this 
priestly character which is the subject of Fabre's 
studies, whether he lingers with the country curds 
in the Cevennes, among priests of the Lord who 
heal the physical ailments of horse and man, as in 
the Courbezons and Mon Oncle Cdlestin, or guides 
us through the intricacies of the conflict between 
Rome backed by the religious congregations and 
the remnants of Gallicanism as in Lucifer, or 
depicts the terrific shapes which egotism and envy 
take on in the narrow and darkened soul of an 
ambitious cleric as in JU Abbi Tigrane. 

It is a character which fascinates and repels. 
The narrowness which is the condition of its 
strength makes it hard of comprehension by the 
modern world. This fact does not in the least 
disconcert the priest. ' Dieu a maudit le monde. 



FERDINAND FABRE 69 

nous n'avons qu'un devoir stricte envers lui, c'est 
de le sauver,' says the Superior of the Capuchins 
in U Abbd Tigrane. 

This is no pulpit rhetoric, it represents the sober 
and permanent conviction of the ecclesiastical con- 
science, the true 'power behind the Pope/ It is, 
moreover, the correct deduction from the prin- 
ciples on which that conscience has been formed. 
From the age of fourteen the future priest is 
trained in the monastic seclusion of the seminary. 
That training is of course primarily theological ; 
but theology alone will not fit him for his career as 
a fisher of men. He must have some notion of 
history, for history is a part of apologetics ; he 
must know some natural science, for we live in 
the days of the professor ; he must at least have 
a smattering of philosophy, for Kant and Hegel 
require periodic refutation. None of these things 
indeed need he know for their own sake. Every- 
thing must be done Ad majorem, Dei Gloriam, and 
the glory of God is the triumph of the Church. In 
the ordinary life of men in the ' world/ the ideal 
motive is intermittent. It intervenes in the play 
of passion and impulse to correct, to guide, to 
modify ; nor is this state of things without justi- 
fication. Vauvenargues says that we perhaps owe 
the greatest advantages of the spirit to our 
passions, and that, without them, man would 



70 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

never have learned the lesson of reason. Far 
otherwise is the ecclesiastical view based on a 
scholastic realism which considers reason and 
passion not as psychological products, as resultants 
of the interplay of consciousness and environment, 
as complementary factors, to be allowed their full 
value in the construction of character, but as 
objective entities really existing in the terms of 
their definitions and necessarily at perpetual war. 
Hence it comes about that, in the case of the 
priest, the action of the ideal motive is incessant, 
omnipresent, all-devouring. Sometimes of course 
a terrific reaction ensues. Sometimes the strings 
screwed up to their top note will snap. When 
this happens, when the priest 'falls,' great indeed 
is his fall. He is unlikely to stop in his down- 
ward course at the average moral or immoral level 
of the mere man of the world. 

The positive elements of the seminary training 
are reinforced and intensified by the negative. 
The young Levite is kept in as complete seclusion 
as possible throughout the whole period of his 
education. The result is that he grows up in 
complete ignorance of the real life of men and 
women in the world. He has no conception of the 
existence of any ethical system whatever except 
the one in which he has been trained. All those 
then who do not acknowledge the claims of 



FERDINAND FABRE 71 

that system are necessarily without real morality. 
Matthew Arnold has told us in one of his most 
charming essays, of the account of the religion of 
Paganism which he found in the Abbe Migne's Dic- 
tionnaire des Origines du Christianisme. * Pagan- 
ism invented a mob of divinities with the most 
hateful character, and attributed to them the most 
monstrous and abominable crimes. It personified 
in them drunkenness, incest, kidnapping, adultery, 
sensuality, knavery, cruelty and rage . . . what 
must naturally have been the state of morals 
under the influence of such a religion, which pene- 
trated with its own spirit the public life, the family 
life, and the individual life of antiquity.' Scarcely 
less wide of the mark is the only view of the 
world around him possible to the average semin- 
arist. What can the noblest aspirations of modern 
life be to him ? Mere deliramenta. What can he 
think of the passion of liberty when he has been 
taught to believe that all ethic is founded on the 
basic virtue of minute and rigid obedience to 
authority? What he thinks of the desire for 
justice, so ineradicable an element of the modern 
conscience, the last few years of French history 
have proved us ad nauseam. 

Thus armed with weapons which, if they were 
adapted for the purpose in hand, he would lack the 
strength to wield, he emerges at the age of twenty- 



72 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

four to do battle with a world which, even in the 
countries in which he stands without serious rivals 
as the representative of the religious principle, 
needs the stimulus of an electoral crisis seriously 
to advert to his existence. He soon finds that 
the sword which flashed so bravely in the mimic 
warfare of seminary dialectics, snaps in his hand 
like a stage-property when employed on the 
actualities of life ; that men have grown hopelessly 
suspicious of 

The old-world cures they half believe 
For woes they wholly understand. 

Then one of two things happens. If he be a 
man of naturally indolent character he retires into 
his presbytery as a snail into his shell. Those 
who want him can seek him out. He knows that 
the world is all wrong. ' Totus mundus in maligno 
positus est,' says the Apostle, but he lacks the 
strength and perseverance to keep on crying the 
melancholy fact into deaf ears in the market-place. 
To what end indeed ? No one listens to him. 
Not for nothing has he put off the 'old man' of 
his secular garments and been clothed in the 
angelica vestis of the ' new.' He has lost his old, 
his human self, and has put on the abstract person- 
ality of the Church, and it is just that personality 
that the world will have none of. He finds himself 



FERDINAND FABRE 73 

in the position of having constantly to prove his 
existence as a preliminary to the securing of a 
hearing. And the position is an unpleasant, an 
intolerable one. So he gives it up and retires 
to lay mines according to his ability. On the other 
hand, a man of really strong character, whose 
virility has not been sapped by his training, is stung 
by his painful position into the extreme of com- 
bativeness. The celestial war-cry : Quzs ut Deus / 
rings in his ears. God's victory cannot be doubt- 
ful and God's victory is the Church's and the 
Church's is his own. In this way we reach the 
type of the Abbe Tigrane. 

This great man is undoubtedly the most impor- 
tant of Fabre's ecclesiastical creations. Vividly as 
the others are painted, they pale before his fires. 
He glows with the flamboyant colours of an Hilde- 
brand or an Innocent in., and, in happier days, his 
career would doubtless have been such as theirs. 
As it is we take leave of him an Archbishop, still 
in the prime of his life, discussing with his faithful 
Vicar-General his chances of the Cardinalate and 
the Papacy. 

The Abbe Ruffin Capdepont, nicknamed by his 
companions in the seminary Abbe Tigrane on 
account of his irritability, is one of the high officials 
of the diocese of Lormieres which is governed 
at the time the story opens by the aristocratic, 



74 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

generous-minded Mgr. de Roquebrun. This pre- 
late has also his weaknesses of temper which do 
not make easier his relations with his Superieur 
du Grand Seminaire. 

Capdepont hates the bishop, who has, he con- 
ceives, robbed him of the diocese of Lormieres. 
Nolo Episcopari was never his motto, and he had 
so dwelt on the chances of his appointment to the 
see that when Mgr. Roquebrun was chosen for the 
mitre he felt it was a personal and unforgiveable 
insult. 

1 On ne sait pas assez chez les laiques ce qu'est 
l'episcopat pour un pretre. Hier vous etiez simple 
soldat dans une armee de quatre-vingt mille 
hommes (il y a environ quatre-vingt mille ecclesi- 
astiques en France), aujourd'hui vous passez tout 
d'un coup general. La transition n'est pas plus 
menagee que cela. Le desservant, le cure-doyen, 
le chanoine, le grand-vicaire possedent les memes 
droits canoniques restreints ; l'eveque seul possede 
le sacerdoce dans sa plenitude. Et puis quelle 
situation autre dans le monde ! vous etes prince 
de la Sainte Eglise Romaine, on vous appelle 
14 Monseigneur," le pape ne vous nomme plus que 
" Venerable Frere," s'il veut prononcer une decision 
relative a la reforme du dogme ou de la discipline 
il ne peut le faire sans vous ; {LAbbd Tigrane 
was written before 1870) vous allez a Rome, ad 



FERDINAND FABRE 75 

limina apostolorum, comme on dit, et Ton vous 
re^oit ail Vatican avec la haute distinction accordee 
aux souverains. Qui sait si maintenant que vous 
avez la mitre d'eveque, vous n'obtiendrez pas plus 
tard la barette de Cardinal ? Qui sait meme si, 
par le fait des revolutions dont nos temps ne sont 
pas avares, vous ne coifferez pas un jour la tiare ? 
Urbain iv. netait-il pas le fils d'un savetier de 
Troye? Jean xxn. n'avait-il pas vu le jour a 
Cahors ? ' 

It must not be supposed that the Superieur du 
Grand Seminaire is represented as a 'bad priest.' 
Far from it; his morals are above suspicion; 'Je 
fus toujours chaste ! ' he exclaims one day, in a 
moment of expansion to his confidant l'Abbe Mical. 
He has but one passion — ambition. 

1 Zelus domus tuce comedit me!' His zeal for 
the glory of God's house has turned into a mon- 
strous, despotic egotism. God must conquer ; who 
so fit to win the Church's battle as himself? But, 
to win that battle, he must have a free hand, he 
must have power, ever more and more power. He, 
at last, comes in his monomania to identify himself 
with his cause, or rather his cause with himself. 
He can only see the triumph of God in his own 
exaltation. So he is led, on the occasion of Mgr. 
de Roquebrun's funeral, into a moment of real 
insanity, when, to the horror even of his own sup- 



76 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

porters, he snatches at the episcopal ring on the 
hand of the deceased prelate, whom he insults in 
death by refusing admission to his body into his 
own cathedral. The critics took exception to this 
terrible scene on the ground of caricature. Fabre 
replied that the Abbe Tigrane was no fictitious 
character, and that he had not dared to give the 
real facts of the case as they had come to his know- 
ledge precisely for fear of that criticism. The 
original Tigrane had left the Bishop's remains, not 
in the Cathedral square, but in the episcopal 
stables ! 

It is needless to say that Tigrane aspired to 
succeed the Bishop, and such was his ability that 
he did so. His enemies did not fail to inform the 
Vatican of his scandalous behaviour, but in vain. 

No one, of course, supposes — Fabre least of all 
— that Tigrane is the average priest. He is typical 
in a very different sense to that. All strong-minded 
men of action are inclined to be ambitious, and 
their ambition may, as likely as not, assume a 
form which is profitable to society. In 1 igrane we 
see an extreme instance of the ravages of ambition 
in the ecclesiastical soul. And precisely that form 
of ambition is essentially a priestly vice — or virtue. 
Its peculiar quality as well as its intensity comes 
from the identification by the priest of himself with 
the Highest, of his own egotism with the transcen- 



FERDINAND FABRE 77 

dental egotism of the Church. It is in the fact 
that no one but he is in the position to make that 
identification, that the unique quality of the priest's 
ambition consists, while its peculiar intensity is due 
to the concentration of his professional ideal of all 
that energy which, in the case of most men, is dis- 
tributed over a variety of objects, together with the 
narrowness of outlet which is the inevitable result 
of his education. No one knew better than Fabre 
that all priests are not ambitious, and, in his long 
series of ecclesiastical portraits, he has shown us 
not a few humble and zealous servants of humanity. 
To them all honour. But he has shown us in 
Tigrane a typical instance of what clerical ambition 
means, and he also knew how liable priests are to 
that particular vice. The drunken or incontinent 
priest is the victim of faults common to all men. 
Such a one pecca come uomo — he sins as a man — as 
a dignitary once said to the present writer : Tigrane, 
on the other hand, may be said to sin as Lucifer. 

In reading these criticisms of the French and 
English Churches one cannot but be struck by the 
difference of the problems presented by either form 
of Christianity. The anonymous forces which, by 
their more or less constant equilibrium, have main- 
tained the Church of England in existence, must 
necessarily come under the influence of the Time- 
spirit. Indeed, it is obvious that that spirit is what 



78 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

gives the Church its 'form,' as scholastics would 
say ; while, on the other hand, the Catholic Church 
anathematises, in Pius ix.'s Syllabus, those who 
would be rash enough to maintain ' that the Roman 
Pontiff can and ought to effect a reconciliation and 
compromise with progress, liberalism, and modern 
civilisation.' And though ecclesiastical authority 
has at present a wary course to steer between the 
achieved results of secular science and the positions 
to which traditional theology stands committed, its 
success is not by any means so uncertain as anti- 
clericals like to think. For those positions by no 
means always engage infallibility, and, even when 
they do, the infallibility of a decree is one thing, 
and its interpretation another. Interpretation may 
well be progressive. This is not the place to discuss 
the ecclesiastical future of Europe, but I may be 
allowed at the close of this essay to indicate an 
element of the discussion which too often fails to 
obtain recognition. The real life of the Catholic 
Church is its mystical life. The Church's politico- 
ecclesiastical appearance shifts and changes, it is 
the work of men not, as a rule, distinguished above 
their fellows for intelligence or spiritual quality, and 
often conspicuously below them. To suppose that 
the life of the Church depends on anything they 
can say or do would be a grotesque inversion of 
things. The sources of the Church's life are not 



FERDINAND FABRE 79 

to be found in consistories or any conceivable 
priestly conciliabule, but are deep in the semi- 
conscious soul of the civilisation at whose birth she 
was present and to whose development her assist- 
ance has, up till our day, been necessary. Will 
that assistance be always necessary ? or, to vary 
the question, will those sources ever run dry ? He 
would be a rash man who would answer. 



80 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 

Sixteen years ago M. Jules Huret, the well-known 
Parisian journalist, published an Enquete sur 
? Evolution Littdraire. He interviewed some 
thirty of the best-known novelists and men of 
letters in France and gave their views to the 
world without comment, save that involved in the 
colloquial skill with which he gracefully delivered 
them of their opinions. And he thus produced a 
most interesting and important volume. Apart 
from the literary value of the pot-pourri, its signifi- 
cance was of the highest. For the writers inter- 
viewed — such was M. Huret's professional ability — 
did not hesitate to express themselves with in- 
genuous candour on their own prospects and those 
of their confreres. 

On first reading one derived but a hopelessly 
confused impression, but gradually, as the cloud of 
stormy eloquence rose, one discerned two things on 
which the writers interviewed seemed pretty well 
agreed : That naturalism was dead, and that among 
the jeunes, from whom something new was to be 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 81 

expected, Huysmans, Remy de Gourmont, and 
Maurice Barres had, in the vivid vernacular of the 
French writing-table, quelque chose dans le ventre. 
Sixteen years have passed, and Barres has left the 
battles of letters for the repose of the Palais Bourbon 
and the Academy, Remy de Gourmont has produced 
several volumes of philosophical romance of a high 
order, and continues to delight us twice a month in 
the Mercure de France with his own strongly indi- 
vidualised blend of Nietzsche and Renan, while 
Huysmans has left us for ever within the last few 
months. He entered into peace through the gate 
of pain, of pain so intolerable that it will not bear 
thinking of, but before the eyes of that lover of 
exquisite sensation were veiled by his last unutter- 
able anguish, he had accomplished his task. 

Jons- Karl Huysmans, who was born in Paris of 
Flemish descent, in 1848, commenced author as a 
fervent disciple of Zola. He was one of the con- 
tributors to the famous Soirdes de Medan with 
Sac-a-dos, a masterpiece of ferocious irony, in which 
the real distress of the patriotic conscript is not 
caused by the heroic sufferings of war, but by an 
unintermittent colic. The satire of the little tale is 
Rabelaisian both in its intensity and the coarseness 
of its detail, and its essential irony is enhanced by 
its humbling and brutal verisimilitude. We cannot 
doubt, as we lay it down, that this, or something 

F 



82 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

like it is, in fact, what war means to most of the 
obscure thousands who are sacrificed to its lurid 
prestige and dubious benefits. I do not know 
whether anarchists make use of Sac-a-dos for their 
propaganda ; they certainly could not do better. 
Les ScBurs Vatard, published in 1879, and dedi- 
cated to Zola by ' his fervent admirer and devoted 
Friend,' is, however, the greatest work produced 
by Huysmans, during what is called his naturalist 
period. It is indeed one of the finest works pro- 
duced by any of the writers of that school, and far 
more faithful to the naturalist formula than Zola's 
epic poems in prose. Huysmans understood 
naturalism in the sense of Flaubert, who, in spite 
of the romantic beauty of his expression, revealed 
himself as the first and greatest of the naturalists 
in Mme. B ovary. Huysmans indeed renounced, 
whether unconsciously, or through deliberate reflec- 
tion, Flaubert's search for beauty of expression, 
seeking nothing but accuracy and fulness of pre- 
sentation. This he achieves by means of an 
amazing accumulation of physical detail, which 
produces on the imagination almost the effect of an 
actual experience. There is a description of a 
Fair in Les Sceurs Vatard, which is one of the most 
astonishing pieces of realistic writing ever com- 
posed. As you read it the book fades before your 
eyes : you are there, at Vincennes, you are burnt 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 83 

by the sun, you are deafened by the shouts of 
cheap-jacks, you eagerly elbow your way through 
the steaming, struggling crowd to contemplate the 
charms of the femme colosse and the sinister arts of 
the serpent-charmer ; you are alternately touched 
and mortified by the sentimental gaucheries of 
Desiree Vatard, who clings after the manner of 
her class to your arm, and when you lay the book 
down, you feel the physical and mental fatigue 
inseparable from such a way of passing the after- 
noon. In this book Huysmans succeeds in trans- 
ferring, by suggestion, sensorial impressions to the 
imagination directly, with all the acute crudeness 
of sheer physical contact. But this is not all. The 
psychology of Desiree and Celine Vatard, the wise 
and the foolish virgin, is presented carefully and 
convincingly. Two years out of the lives of two 
little Parisian work-girls, one of whom is tempera- 
mentally chaste and the other the reverse, but both 
of them bonnes filles, Celine the noceuse, with a 
highly comical sense of her own dignity and her 
soul of a poor little animal which, after all, asks 
only to gratify its instincts ; Desiree, the virtuous, 
with all the elements of thejeune Jille of bourgeois 
romance, saved from her sister's troubles by a 
natural modesty of blood, as primary and ineluct- 
able a necessity of her being, as Celine's riotous 
desires are of hers — this is all the story. And yet 



84 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

on this narrow scene, within these sordid and trivial 
limits, the whole of life seems to pass before us. 
The ambitious generalisation, the pseudo-scientific 
theorising of Zola, is wholly absent from the pages. 
Every character in the pitiful little play from the 
leading ladies to the merest super, to the strangers 
one brushes in the street, is individualised, is given 
his full value as a human unique, every episode is 
made wholly concrete, the author not only never 
once betrays any desire to explain things, but does 
not even suggest the faintest personal interest in 
his puppets. He is wholly absent from his crea- 
tion, his pen seeming to react mechanically to the 
stimulus of the spectacle. Flaubert's ideal of the 
impersonality of the artist is attained, and the 
effect is the most poignant imaginable. Just so, 
we feel, would life appear to us if we saw it as 
it really is, apart from the deforming mirage of 
our egoistic passions. Just so would it appear, we 
think, to some superhuman intelligence, some angel 
or demi-urge who, freed from the limitations and 
exigencies of sense perception, would be equally 
emancipated from those torturing and delicious 
derivatives of the senses, the imagination and the 
emotions. But, after all, such a fantastic hypo- 
thesis is unnecessary, it is just so that it appears to 
the purified eye of the scientific observer 'from 
hope and fear set free.' 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 85 

Equally galling to the vital instinct and satis- 
factory to the instinct of knowledge is A Vau 
rEau. It is a short story of some fifteen thousand 
words which details the miseries of a vieux ce'liba- 
taire in Paris. M. Folantin is a Government 
employe 1 at £60 a year; he is timid in temperament, 
moderate in desires, but he possesses a plain, strong 
intelligence which precludes the possibility of 
contentment with the few poor illusions which his 
pittance can buy. Once more, in this dreary little 
tale, we are made to drink the bitter lees of 
existence. The essential bitterness of the draught 
is caused by the absolute futility of such lives as 
M. Folantin's. And millions of such lives are 
necessitated by the conditions of humanity. It is 
not merely that all super - terrestrial hope, all 
religious and metaphysical aspiration are banished 
from such lives — this if we accept science as our 
only reliable guide, we must be prepared for — it is 
that such lives themselves are hopelessly mutilated. 
It is, however, in the conviction of the nothingness, 
the ndant of life, that Huysmans finds the real 
tragedy of humanity. It is not merely that men 
suffer — the highest hope that ever irradiated man's 
heart was based on the joyous acceptance of 
suffering — it is that neither suffering nor joy really 
matter. The universe goes on its senseless way to 
its purposeless end that is no conclusion — for it 



86 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

never ends, or rather it ends but to re-commence — 
blindly throwing up from the depths of the uncon- 
scious, millions of conscious organisms, stamped as, 
under the old regime, French criminals were 
branded with a red-hot fleur de lys, with the ironic 
insignia of an illusory royalty. Man waves his 
stage sceptre with an inalienable sense of freedom 
and power, and what happens ? That which was 
irrevocably determined to happen when our solar 
system was still but a nebula, but a faintly luminous 
corona in the ether. And the irony of the situation 
is raised to its highest, most sinister point when we 
reflect that man's illusion is as surely determined as 
his impotence. For what is ' man's place in the 
universe ' ? For a few seconds the world reaches 
the point of self-consciousness, and mirrors itself in 
the passive contemplation of a human mind before 
sinking again into the unconscious eternity on the 
surface of which organic life itself is but a ripple. 
Those minds are re-duplicated a millionfold, yet 
each subsists but for a few moments while, sooner 
or later, the conditions of the planet will no longer 
permit the existence of any at all. 

As the conditions of life burn lower 'the universe 
will slowly turn from the enigmatic and redoubtable 
experiment of self-consciousness, and the peace of 
death will brood once more over unconscious 
matter. Such is the world as known to naturalism, 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 87 

and the contemplation of it as the only certitude 
bred in Huysmans a dull despair. He exhaled his 
hatred of life in that strange fantasy A Rebours. 
Life is worthless indeed, but, for the privileged 
few, there is art. Let us then abandon life and 
live in an aristocratic dream of beauty, of beauty 
created by our own brains and hands, for the so- 
called beauty of nature is a delusion. The beauty 
of nature lends directly or indirectly to the strength- 
ening and enhancing of the vital instinct, and 
therefore to the perpetuation of the iniquity of life. 
Nature's appeal is so obviously in most cases to 
the nerves rather than to the brain, hence the 
success of the uneducated. Popular ' art ' follows 
also the line of least resistance, there must be 
something wrong even about Rembrandt, for such 
hopeless people admire him. He might have 
added that moonlight cannot really be beautiful 
because it makes nurse-maids sentimental. 

The further art can go from nature the better. 
The artistic sensations that Huysmans preferred 
were subtle, rare and complex. The Art that is 
simple and majestic, the Art, for instance, that was 
the product of the Greek mind, says nothing to 
him. The neurotic hero, Des Esseintes, who has 
retired to the hermitage of his villa to live a life of 
delicate inversion, spends an hour or two dreaming 
over his favourite books. His * Index' is signifi- 



88 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

cant. Virgil is ' L'un des plus terribles cuistres, 
Tun des plus sinistres raseurs que l'antiquite ait 
jamais produits.' Horace ' a des graces ele- 
phantines.' Ovid and Tacitus bore him less than 
other classical writers, but he is really at his ease 
only with the Decadents. Lucan and Petronius 
ravish him, particularly Petronius in his Satyricon. 
At the end of the book Des Esseintes feels the 
reminiscent sting of his early religious training and 
cries aloud for Faith. The book closes with his 
prayer : ' Seigneur, prenez pitie du chretien qui 
doute, de l'incredule qui voudrait croire, du forgat 
de la vie qui s'embarque seul, dans la nuit sous un 
firmament que n'eclairent plus les consolants fanaux 
du vieil espoir ! ' This monograph on aesthetic 
neurasthenia, as it might be called, contains some 
of the finest passages Huysmans ever wrote. 
Take the marvellous description of Gustave Mo- 
reau's f Apparition or Des Esseintes' terrific vision 
of Scrofula, the secular scourge of human genera- 
tions. Never have words been made to do so 
much. A Rebotirs, opening with Des Esseintes' 
rejection of life, and ending with his hysterical cry 
for Faith, is the bridge connecting Huysmans* 
first and second period ; his naturalism and his 
mysticism. Yet this criticism, in order not to be 
misleading, must be made more precise. In 
method Huysmans remained an impenitent natural- 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 89 

ist to the end. Whether he is writing of M. 
Folantin's despairing hunt for a decent meal in the 
restaurants of his quartier, or of the visions of St. 
Lidwina of Schiedam, his methods are always the 
same. He proceeds invariably by the accumulation 
of physical details which build up, as it were, cell 
by cell, the organic whole of the scene he is 
evoking. The intensity of the evocation, when 
complete, is due to the power with which the 
details are made to live in themselves, and the skill 
with which they are inter-related. He produces a 
composition which lives in the apparently spon- 
taneous unity of a concrete moment. For — and in 
an attempt to appreciate Huysmans, the point can- 
not be too strongly made, — he is always concerned 
with the concrete episode, which is indeed what 
gives him his place among the purest and greatest 
of naturalistic Masters, affiliating him also, in no 
uncertain way, to those other great naturalist 
artists, the painters of his native land. The 
technique of his imaginative perception is very 
closely reminiscent of the methods of the Flemish 
painters. The exquisite conscientiousness with 
which his details are finished, his sense of colour, a 
certain rich simplicity of order in his composition, 
the constant recurrence of certain elements — meals 
almost taking the place in his pages of the white 
horse with his red-coated rider in the pictures of 



90 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Wouvermans — his sense for the sordid, the trivial, 
are characteristics which surely indicate the artistic 
family to which he belongs. 

In discourse he is at his worst. The theological 
and archaeological disquisitions which seem to be 
interpolated, as indeed they are, in his later works, 
have a merely informational value and that, I fancy, 
not always of the soundest. Certainly his theology 
sounds peculiar at times. Nor does their weakness 
come from the inherent difficulty in taking up a 
new subject in middle age : it comes from his 
innate incapacity to express himself in the way of 
discourse. His attempts at reasoning in LefFoules 
de Lourdes, one of his latest works in which he 
hotly defends the miraculous nature of that success- 
ful watering-place, are those of a clever child who 
constantly misses the point through his inability to 
resist distractions. You feel too that he is aware 
of his unconvincingness, and being unable, from the 
nature of the case, to use his own methods, turns 
in vain to bitterness and even, on occasion, to 
personal abuse of those so unfortunate as not to 
share his prepossessions, in order, as they say, to 
help himself out. The same tendency is visible in 
the didactic parts of En Route. 

We have seen that there is no difference in 
Huysmans' earlier and later methods, that his 
changre was not in manner but in content. In the 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 91 

first pages of La-Bas, the volume which follows A 
Rebours and precedes En Route, there occurs a 
dialogue which throws a light on his new departure. 
After Des Hermies has said that naturalism was 
the incarnation of materialism in literature, the 
glorification of democracy in art, so correct a 
representation of bourgeois ideas, ' qu'il semble une 
parole, issue de l'accouplement de Lisa, la char- 
cutiere du Ventre de Paris et de Homais,' Durtal 
replies : ■ Le materialisme me repugne tout autant 
qu a toi, mais ce n'est pas une raison pour nier les 
inoubliables services que les naturalistes ont rendus 
a l'art, car, enfin, ce sont eux qui nous ont 
debarasses des inhumains fantoches du romantisme 
et qui ont extrait la litterature d'une idealisme de 
ganache et d'une inanition de vieille fille exaltee 
par le celibat ! En somme, apres Balzac, ils ont 
cree des etres visibles et palpables et ils les ont 
mis en accord avec leurs alentours, ils ont aide au 
developpement de la langue commencee par les 
romantiques ; ils ont connu le veritable rire et ont 
parfois meme le don des larmes, enfin, ils n'ont pas 
toujours ete souleves par ce fanatisme de bassesse 
dont tu paries.' 

Des Hermies leaves and Durtal continues his 
soliloquy, summing up his conclusions as follows : — 
' II faudrait garder la veracite du document, la 
precision du detail, la langue etoffee et nerveuse du 



92 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

realisme, mais il faudrait aussi se faire puisatier 
dame et ne pas vouloir expliquer le mystere par 
les maladies des sens ; le roman, si cela se pouvait, 
devrait se deviser de lui-meme en deux parts, 
neanmoins soudees ou plutot confondues, comme 
elles le sont dans la vie, celle de Tame, celle du 
corps, et s'occuper de leurs reactifs, de leurs 
conflits, de leur entente. II faudrait, en un mot, 
suivre la grande voie si profondement creusee par 
Zola, mais il serait necessaire aussi de tracer en 
l'air un chemin parallele, une autre route, d'atteindre 
les en deqa. et les apres, de faire, en un mot, un 
naturalisme spiritualiste ; ce serait autrement fier, 
autrement complet, autrement fort ! ' 

Such is the artistic programme which Huysmans 
attempted to carry out in his later period. As I 
have said, he in no way wished to modify the 
methods of his technique which remained essentially 
naturalist ; he wished to enlarge the content of his 
art, to widen the field of his observation. When 
he speaks of tracing in the air a parallel line to 
Zola's line of physical observation he makes indeed 
a philosophical advance on his former position, for 
sound philosophy recognises that experience needs 
for its constitution a subject as well as an object, 
from which it follows that a state of mind as such, 
independently of its physical accompaniment, is as 
truly a fact as a state of body. This step was no 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 93 

doubt taken unconsciously, for there never was a 
mind more radically incapable of any kind of 
philosophic speculation than his. It is nevertheless 
what constitutes the human interest of the work of 
his later period. For that interest certainly cannot 
be said to lie in his somewhat bizarre presentation 
of Christian mythology, which he happened to find 
ready to his hand, to be tortured and inverted by 
the horrible maniacs whom he shows us in La-Bas, 
to be enthusiastically, if somewhat uncritically, 
glorified in En Route and his other distinctively 
Catholic works. It lies surely in the recognition 
of the mystery of human experience diffused 
through these volumes, together with the sense of 
pity of the human lot and of the supreme value of 
love. For these emotions he found both adequate 
expression and an adequate stimulus, in the symbols 
of mediaeval mysticism. Nor was that expression 
and that stimulus purely literary. As is known, the 
road of Damascus, on which Durtal travels from 
La-Bas to UOblat, was the path followed by his 
creator. Whether Huysmans' interest in Catholi- 
cism was due in the first instance to the exigencies 
of his literary development or to the necessities of 
his soul is an unprofitable subject of inquiry. It is 
enough for the critic to note that his hand grew 
subdued to what he worked in, and that the man 
came to acquiesce, with the full fervour of intense 



94 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

conviction, in the doctrines of the writer. To 
criticise the personal solution in which he at length 
found peace would be foreign to the subject of this 
essay, and obviously of the nature of an impertin- 
ence. Nevertheless as there have been several, 
and not of one camp only, who have openly 
expressed their doubts of the sincerity of his 
attitude, I cannot refrain from expressing the 
opinion that never was there a more complete, a 
more sincere conversion than that of Huysmans. 
None of the psychological elements of such a 
change were wanting to him. A disgust of 
contemporary life and an invincible repulsion to its 
ideals, together with an ardent attraction for the 
naive beauty of the mediaeval soul, for the whole 
domain of that wondrous ' fief of Art,' as he calls it, 
which was the creation of the mediaeval Church — 
these were most prominent among the raisons de 
coeur which prevailed with him. The mysterious 
crystallisation of these elements into the definite 
attitude of belief, is as necessarily beyond criticism 
as any other vital phenomenon. So much may per- 
haps be said without offence. When, however, w T e 
turn to the literary expression of his convictions, we 
are once more in the world of discourse, we have 
once more before us matter for reasoned appreciation. 
What cannot fail to strike any one at all familiar 
with contemporary Catholic literature is thatHuys- 



JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 95 

mans' religious books fall into a category of their 
own. The man submits to the discipline which is 
to save his soul, the writer remains a free lance. 
The distinctive Catholic literature of our day is 
either apologetic or written for purposes of edifica- 
tion. And the public which it is attempted to edify 
must be confined entirely, one would think, to women 
and children. Huysmans certainly did not try to 
put himself in line with this class of book. And, as 
regards apologetic, it must be admitted that so far 
as he had it in mind at all, it was of a very different 
kind to that which we associate with the subtle 
disquisitions of philosophers, such as Laberthon- 
niere and Leroy, or the quasi-socialist propaganda 
of the Christian democrats. The social or philo- 
sophical possibilities of present-day religion had 
not the slightest interest for his mind which was 
spellbound by the vision of the glorious past, le 
moyen age dnorme et ddicat. In fact he was a 
medisevalist before he was a Catholic. In Ld-Bas, 
while still far from any mental state which could be 
called faith, he is a firm believer in the super- 
natural, in magic, black and white. He knows the 
names of many demons and their functions in the 
cosmic economy. Indeed it is matter of reproach 
with him against the ecclesiastical authorities, that 
they betray so languid an interest in demonology ; 
are, in fact, as he fears, tainted with scepticism. 



96 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Why insist on trying to come to an understanding 
with M. Clemenceau, when you are really dealing 
with Azrael ? 

Thus he resuscitates for us in his vibrant pages 
that old world, and makes it live once more with 
its fantastic hopes and fears, its heaven and hell, its 
angels and saints and demons. He does more. 
He resuscitates also its beauty. The guardians 
of the heavenly city to-day are often too much 
absorbed in the immediate exigencies of the Holy 
War to care for the beauty of the streets of 
Jerusalem. The service which Huysmans has 
done in calling attention to the treasure of Art 
which is the heritage of the Catholic Church is one 
which should make the members of that Church his 
debtors, and in any case, entitles him to the gratitude 
of all lovers of the beautiful everywhere. 



MAETERLINCK 97 



MAETERLINCK 

Among contemporary masters of prose, no one, I 
think, gives so unique an impression, no one ex- 
hales so special a fragrance as Maeterlinck. Is 
he a lyric poet? Is he a dramatist? Is he a 
moralist? It is hard to say; indeed, he seems 
to be all of these by turn, and, even, on occasion, 
at once. 

He has written many miniature dramas — 
1 Shakespeare for Marionettes,' he calls them him- 
self — some of which are the most poignant little 
pieces imaginable, all drenched with the tears and 
mystery of things ; fragments of life itself, we 
think, as we read or watch them for the first time, 
almost catching our breath at the naivete of their 
frankness, at their childlike ingenuousness. He 
has signed pages of criticism, in their way in- 
imitable ; although they do not contain much of 
what is ordinarily understood by the term. His 
essays on Emerson, Ruysbroeck, and Novalis 
convey no personal impression whatever of those 
great ones ; they deal with the pure idea, and 

G 



98 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

barely advert to the human envelope. But then 
the idea is made to thrill with a mystic person- 
ality, more intense than any which could be 
suggested by the greatest accumulation of circum- 
stantial or merely casual detail. Such work is at 
the opposite pole of the critical art to, say, Mr. 
Gosse's admirable study of Coventry Patmore. 
There, bit by bit, the human being is recon- 
structed and presented to us with all the illusion 
of a live-eyed portrait, as he was seen, loved and 
hated by his contemporaries. It is just this 
suggestion of familiarity, of personal knowledge, 
so skilfully conveyed by the art of Mr. Gosse, 
which is utterly lacking to the essays of Maeter- 
linck. From his point of view, such treatment 
would be worse than irrelevant : it would be 
almost indecent. On that high tableland of the 
spirit, against the background of those eternal 
snows, the human gesture, which our flesh can- 
not but love, would pathetically dwindle into a 
grotesque and pitiful pantomime. 

It is said that some of the most beautiful effects 
of Corot's landscapes were produced by the 
master at such a distance from the subject he 
was painting that all detail was indistinguishable 
to the eye. So Maeterlinck discerns the spiritual 
values of a Novalis or a Ruysbroeck by altogether 
overlooking their existence in time and space, and 



MAETERLINCK 99 

concentrating his gaze on the light of the idea 
which they at once conceal and manifest. For if, 
to the winking eyes of most of us, that light is 
only tolerable by being broken on the prism, as it 
were, of the seer's personality, by being refracted 
through the daily habit of his life and conversa- 
tion, which thus reveals to us as much of it as 
we can bear, all that to Maeterlinck does but con- 
ceal what he is in search of. He prefers to look 
straight at the sun. We, who are not eagles, suffer 
in the effort to share his vision ; and a darkness, 
which we feel would reveal so much could we but 
pierce it, is apt to descend on our straining gaze. 
The same criticism applies to the other essays — 
on moral and spiritual subjects — collected in the 
same volume under the title of Le Trdsor des 
Humbles. Here and there the clouds part, and 
an astonishingly pure and lambent ray gladdens 
us for a moment; we feel we never knew what 
light was before, like those who for the first time 
see the Italian sun ; then, once more, obscurity. 
One thing, however, no conscientious student of 
Maeterlinck can maintain ; and that is, that his 
obscurity partakes in ever so slight a degree of a 
pose, of a deliberate mystification. Here is no atti- 
tude of indifference, no mask of intellectual scorn, 
but rather the patient effort of a most unusual sin- 
cerity which, with the obvious repression of a fine 



100 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

rhetorical gift, endeavours to express exactly what 
is meant ; just that and nothing more. Such sin- 
cerity inevitably appears a little forced and arti- 
ficial to those who come to it fresh from the 
comfortable atmosphere of polite human inter- 
course. Professor Wallace attributes the difficulty 
presented by Hegel's philosophy to a beginner, 
to the contrast which it offers to our ordinary 
habits of mind. ' Generally speaking, we rest 
contented if we can get tolerably near our object, 
and form a general picture of it to set before our- 
selves. It might almost be said that we have never 
thought of such a thing as being in earnest, either 
with our words or with our thoughts/ Just such a 
contrast exists between our habitual retailing, for 
purposes of social currency, of our profoundest 
and most intimate emotions, and Maeterlinck's 
method of dealing with them. We cannot avoid 
the prick, that if we were purer in heart, we 
should understand him better. 

It is proposed here to consider Maeterlinck as a 
moralist. That the preoccupation of morals, of 
the practical art of life, has always been with him, 
is evident ; in his earliest work it is not absent, 
but it has only disengaged itself and become fully 
self-conscious in his latest writings, in La Sagesse 
et la Destinde, Le Temple Ensveli, and Le Double 
Jardin ; and it will be with these volumes that 



MAETERLINCK 101 

we shall be here principally concerned. It may, 
however, be well, before considering their con- 
tents, to have clearly before us the state of mind 
to which Maeterlinck addresses himself. The 
condition of the hearer is always an important 
part of the message he receives ; and this is 
especially so when the teacher, as in the present 
instance, is rather a master of suggestion than 
of exposition. What then is the mental attitude 
on this subject of his readers, so numerous and 
appreciative that a new ' Maeterlinck ' has no 
sooner appeared than it has flown in its thousands 
over Europe ? 

* Nous sortons de la grande periode religieuse.' 
That great change, gradually produced during the 
last three hundred years in European opinion, 
which has reduced theology from the position of 
the Queen of the Sciences to the rank of an in- 
dividual and private speculation, has had its re- 
percussion in other departments of inquiry than 
the theological. Indeed it would not be hard to 
show that no branch whatever of human know- 
ledge has remained unaffected by it. Based itself 
in its origin on knowledge of a particular kind, 
it has succeeded in extending its ' sphere of in- 
fluence' over much which might seem foreign to 
it. The discovery of Copernicus was more than 
a celestial coup d'jBtat. It did more than over- 



102 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

throw man's sovereignty of the heavens ; it surely 
numbered the days of Theocracy on earth. That 
revolution of humanity on its own axis which 
has produced the Arts, the State, Religion and 
Morality, could not remain unaffected by it. Nor 
has it done so. Slowly but surely, what is called 
the scientific spirit has taken over every part of 
human experience. 

A phrase like ' the scientific spirit ' is apt to 
become a catchword. What precisely do we 
mean by it ? Well, I suppose we mean the 
habit of mind engendered by familiarity with the 
method, even if not with the achievements, of 
exact knowledge. It is not necessary, in order to 
possess it, to know the secrets of the laboratory 
or the test tube ; but we shall not gain it if we 
do not understand the principle on which those 
secrets are discovered. That principle is belief 
in the unity and intelligibility in terms of related- 
ness, of the whole phenomenal universe, from 
which it results that a hypothesis has scientific 
value, in proportion to its success in co-ordinating 
the group of phenomena with which it deals, thus 
tending towards that ideal unity, which it is the 
aim of science as a whole to attain. The meta- 
physician will tell us that this belief is a mere 
assumption ; and so, in the terms of his art, it is. 
But it is the assumption which underlies all possi- 



MAETERLINCK 103 

bility of any knowledge which is to be more than 
mere random and, occasionally, happy guess-work. 
For science is no esoteric craft. The physiologist 
or the chemist has no short cut to truth ; he uses 
precisely the same faculties of perception and 
ratiocination by means of which we all organise 
a journey from Victoria to the Gare du Nord. 
He uses them no doubt with far greater caution, 
with an infinitely nicer sense of what is meant by 
evidence, of the exigencies of demonstration, than 
the layman ; but his instrument of investigation 
differs only in degree of precision. It is an ill- 
judged contempt that some people pour on popular 
science ; if science were not, at least potentially, 
popular, it would not be science at all. Of course, 
pure, as distinguished from applied, science does 
require certain special habits of trained attention 
which are not at the command of all of us. But 
the most advanced scientific experimentalist has 
no other faculties to use in his investigations than 
those which lie more or less idle in the brains of 
all of us. Once stated, this is obvious ; but it is 
by no means so universally appreciated as might be 
thought. Many educated people talk of science as 
if it were a special department of knowledge, or 
one particular way of knowing things ; whereas, in 
truth, the only real knowledge is scientific know- 
ledge. 



104 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Another fallacy, common enough among the 
laity, is to confuse the method of science in general 
with the results of any particular science. Thus 
the champions of intellectual reaction not infre- 
quently argue from the errors which inevitably 
attach to those results, to the discredit of the idea 
of science itself. ' How little, after all, we know,' 
they say, ' and how unreliable that little ! Science 
shifts like the sand ; how can we take it seriously ? ' 
These critics do not realise the distinction between 
the method of science and its results in application. 
They do not see that it is by clinging more and 
more faithfully to that method, that the results are 
gradually and progressively made perfect, that any 
stage of investigation must, as such, be defective, 
and finally that, however unreliable and scanty 
scientific results at any moment may be, they repre- 
sent at that moment the state of our knowledge 
on that subject, and form themselves the point of 
departure for further development. No one knew 
better the defects of his hypothesis than Darwin ; 
and it is just those defects that have been so fruit- 
ful in the further development of his science. There 
are many, however, and they are a daily increasing 
number, who realise that, in the method of science, 
man has discovered the true law of his knowledge ; 
and it is they who dwell in the mental atmosphere 
of the scientific spirit. This atmosphere it is, 



MAETERLINCK 105 

rather than the negative arguments derivable from 
any particular branch of science, that has produced 
the effect on theological belief alluded to above ; 
and it has produced it largely through the change 
in the conception of truth which it implies. In 
pre-scientific days, truth was any desirable opinion 
which could not be disproved ; now the quality of 
truth attaching to a statement is felt to be in exact 
ratio to the evidence producible for it. 

The weakening of theological belief has not been 
without its effect upon morals. In the theological 
period, by which I mean the period during which 
theology was universally accepted by us Westerns 
as the basis of human existence (controversy turn- 
ing only on which was in fact the true theology), 
morality was heteronomous, being based on the 
will of God revealed to man ab extra. That it 
possessed an intrinsic value was not denied except 
by a few mystics ; but its mode of presentation was 
authoritative or external, among Protestants and 
Catholics alike. It was held that the conscience, 
rightly directed and illuminated, would indeed 
recognise the moral quality of the Divine law, but 
that it would recognise it as such, rather than as 
the externalisation of the immanent law of its own 
being. Such recognition involved many non-moral 
elements, such as particular judgments of fact — that 
this revelation and not another was the true one 



106 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

— or a philosophical judgment that Monotheism, 
rather than Pantheism or Atheism, was the ultimate 
truth of things. In proportion as the grounds for 
either or both of these judgments were felt to give 
way under critical analysis, the heteronomous 
sanction of morality disappeared. To the minds of 
many to-day, judgments of either kind appear not 
so much erroneous as gratuitous and illegitimate ; 
and it is to such, and such only, that Maeterlinck 
addresses himself. 

This emancipation of morality has seemed to 
many a great and glorious thing ; and so it may 
be. Nevertheless it cannot, I think, be denied 
that the transition of the art of conduct from heter- 
onomy to autonomy is attended with some danger 
to the content of morality — to our material if not 
to our formal virtue. Many delicate readjustments 
are required, if the passage from the service of God 
to the service of man is to be effected without loss 
by the way. The issue is not quite fairly put by 
those who see in the doctrine of personal rewards 
and punishments the sole value of the theological 
sanction of human conduct. It was more, it was 
other than merely this. That sanction amounted 
to a popular and dramatic representation of the 
belief that Man was, in fact, the most important 
part of the universe, and his conscience the most 
important part of Man. It implied that Man 



MAETERLINCK 107 

touched the deepest reality in his conscience only : 
the universe else was illusion. The triumph of 
good in the long run was certain ; the victory of evil, 
so palpable and evident, but a shadow that would 
flee away at the moment of dayspring, when the 
Sun of Righteousness would disperse the darkness 
and consummate in the blaze of absolute justice the 
drama of humanity. The Infinite was consciously 
on the side of the human soul which was fashioned 
in its image. 

Now all this is changed. ' It is incomparably 
more probable that the Invisible and the Infinite 
intervene at every moment in our life under the 
form of indifferent, enormous, blind elements, which 
pass over and within us, penetrating, shaping and 
animating us, without suspecting our existence, as 
do water, fire, air and light. Now the whole of 
our conscious life, all this life which constitutes our 
one certitude and our one fixed point in time and 
space, reposes in the last resort on incomparable 
probabilities of the same order ; and it is rare that 
they are so incomparable as these.' In these words 
Maeterlinck resumes for us the moral sanction of 
science. And yet, as he adds : ' The whole of our 
moral organism is made to live in justice, as our 
physical organism is made to live in the atmosphere 
of our globe.' Thus a seemingly absolute dilemma 
is created, in which what ought to be is at hopeless 



108 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

variance with what is. It is not merely that the 
universe is not what we wish it were ; it is, and 
this is very different, that it is not what we judge it 
ought to be. 

There are various ways of meeting this situation. 
There is the way of heroic pessimism, which has 
found a noble expression in the Buddhist rhap- 
sodies of the French poet-philosopher Jean Lahor. 
There is the attitude of mingled pity and irony 
which we associate with the best work of Anatole 
France. There is the immoralism of Nietzsche, 
echoed by many thoughtless persons, who would 
shudder at the self-discipline which it involves. 
Maeterlinck takes none of these ways. It must be 
confessed that he does not attempt any dogmatic 
solution, nor does he even allude, in passing, to 
those suggested by others. He is content to 
observe directly, for himself, the moral phenomenon 
with the grave, wide-eyed gaze of an inspired child. 
In his two latest books, the metaphysical preoccu- 
pations observable in his earlier work seem to have 
dropped off him. Life, the actual tale of days of 
men and women, working in fields and cities, in 
courts and camps, at home and abroad, * on perilous 
seas forlorn,' has laid on him the fascination of its 
touch. It is in this actuality, this nearness to 
experience, that his value consists. He probes 
into the moral fact as we find it in our common 



MAETERLINCK 109 

human nature, unconcerned with its metaphysical 
justification, and frankly admitting that our present 
knowledge does not enable us demonstrably to 
relate it to the rest of the Cosmos. Let us glance 
at his method of treating Justice, at once the first 
and the last of moral problems : — 

I speak for those who do not believe in the existence 
of a Judge, unique, all-powerful and infallible, who, bend- 
ing day and night over our thoughts, our sentiments, and 
our actions, maintains justice in this world, and completes 
it elsewhere. If there be no Judge, is there any justice in 
existence other than that organised by men, not only by 
their law and tribunals, but also in all social relations not 
submitted to positive judgment, and having, as a rule, no 
other sanction than that of opinion, the confidence or 
mistrust, the approbation or disapproval, of those who 
surround us? . . . When we have deceived or got the 
better of our neighbour, have we deceived and got the 
better of all the forces of justice ? Is everything definitely- 
settled, and have we nothing more to fear? Or does 
there exist a justice more serious and less liable to error, 
less visible but more profound, more universal and more 
powerful ? 

Man feels with irresistible conviction the exist- 
ence of such a justice. But where does it dwell if 
the heavens be empty? It is not an idle question, 
for on the answer depends the whole of morality. 
Of three men, the first of whom bases his morality 
on the will of God, the second on a belief in some 
sort of physical justice, the third simply on his per- 



110 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

sonal perception of justice, the third is the only one 
who interests the moralist. In him alone is morality 
really autonomous ; and he alone will survive the 
other two. It is as certain as anything can be that 
the source of justice is nowhere in the physical 
universe around us. 'In the world in which we 
live there is no physical justice proceeding from 
moral causes, whether such justice be considered to 
present itself under the form of heredity, illness, or 
of atmospheric, geological, or any other phenomena 
imaginable.' Maeterlinck analyses a few of our 
more obvious illusions on the subject, and succeeds 
in showing, what no one who has seriously con- 
sidered the question can doubt, that Nature only 
punishes breaches of physical law, with an entire 
disregard of the moral quality of such breaches. 
* There is within us a spirit which weighs only 
intentions, there is without us a power which weighs 
only actions.' The ' spirit which weighs only 
intentions ' ; the source and only real sanction of 
morality can, however, act on what is without, 
modifying it to human ends, gradually substituting 
the hut for the cave, evolving the social pact out of 
the egotism of self-preservation, the family out of 
the vagrant impulses of the promiscuous savage. 
Thus a sort of physico-psychological justice is 
brought about which, corresponding within the 
sphere of phenomena subject to human action in a 



MAETERLINCK 111 

manner roughly tolerable to our desires, makes it 
possible for a moral creature to live without too 
much discomfort in a non-moral universe. ■ Nature ' 
frequently upsets this reign of human law by 
'accidents,' and, more often perhaps, by a certain 
defect of comprehension, a certain slowness of 
adaptation to human needs, which is, at times, 
peculiarly exasperating. The idiotic volcano or 
the stupid storm will, at any moment, still for ever 
' Shakespeare's brain or Lord Christ's heart.' Yet 
not altogether ; and here Maeterlinck falls back on 
a conception which it is difficult not to call mystical : 
the conception of the dynamic unity of the universal 
human soul. Whether or not ' mute inglorious 
Miltons ' lie in our churchyards, at least those who 
sing, sing to all of us and for ever. The peasant 
who passes has never heard of Plato; but had 
Plato not thought in such and such a way, his own 
thoughts would have been different. Wisdom, as 
in the old Jewish book, reaches from end to end, 
fortiter et suaviter disponens omnia. This fas- 
cinating doctrine lies outside experimental verifica- 
tion. It has a long history behind it ; echoes of it 
come from the lecture halls of Alexandria and the 
banks of the Ganges ; it seems implied in any 
adequate view of the ' interior life.' And there will 
always be those who will find in it the expression 
of their latent conviction ; for it is one of the first, 



112 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

and not the least attractive, of the paths which open 
before humanity on its homing quest — if indeed it 
be so — back from the ' Many' to the ' One.' . . . 

Apart, however, from such mysticism, Maeter- 
linck finds a stimulus in the analysis of the con- 
ditions of this man-made justice. Its reach is much 
wider, and its effect much deeper, than is commonly 
supposed. Here is a noble passage which cannot 
be laid too much to heart : — 

We willingly place under the heading, ' Injustice of 
the Universe,' a great number of injustices exclusively 
human and infinitely more frequent and more murderous 
than the tempest, illness and fire. I do not speak of 
war ; it might be objected to me that it is attributed less 
to Nature than to the will of peoples or princes. But 
poverty, for instance, which we still place in the list of 
irresponsible evils like the plague or shipwreck, poverty 
with its crushing griefs and hereditary failures, how often 
is it not imputable to the injustice of our social state 
which is but the total of man's injustices? Why at the 
spectacle of an unmerited misery do we seek an heavenly 
judge or an impenetrable cause, as if it were the affair of 
a stroke of lightning? Do we forget that we find our- 
selves here in the best known and surest part of our own 
domain, and that it is we ourselves who organise misery 
and distribute it as arbitrarily, from a moral point of 
view, as the fire its ravages, or sickness its sufferings? 
Is it reasonable for us to wonder at the ocean for not 
taking account of the state of soul of its victim, when we 
who have a soul, that is to say the organ par excellence 
of justice, pay no heed to the innocence of thousands of 
poor wretches who are our victims ? 



MAETERLINCK 113 

And to those who, with the ' complacent religi- 
osity of the rich — that execrable sentiment,' would 
object that virtue and happiness are independent 
of material conditions, he replies: — 

If the child of our good neighbour be born blind, 
idiotic or deformed, we will go and seek, no matter 
where, even in the darkness of a religion we no longer 
practise, a God of some sort to interrogate his thought ; 
but if the child be born poor, which usually lowers no 
less than the most serious infirmity by several degrees 
the destiny of a being, we shall not dream of asking a 
single question of the God who is everywhere where we 
are, since he is made of our will. Before desiring an 
ideal judge, it is necessary to purify our ideas. Before 
bewailing the indifference of Nature and seeking an 
equity which is not there, it were wise to attack, in our 
human regions, an iniquity which is there ; and when it 
is there no longer, the part reserved for the injustices of 
chance will probably appear reduced by two-thirds. It 
will, in any case, be more diminished than if we had made 
the storm reasonable, the volcano perspicacious, the ava- 
lanche prewarned, heat and cold circumspect, sickness 
judicious, the sea intelligent and attentive to our virtues 
and secret intentions. There are, in fact, many more 
paupers than victims of shipwreck or material accidents, 
and many more maladies due to misery than to the 
caprices of our organism or the hostility of the elements. 

Truly a comfortable doctrine, a sound and godly 
form of words. And woe to our ears if they are 
too delicate to hear them ! 

Of course this physico-psychological justice, 
besides being, after all, limited in its range, is 

H 



114 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

evidently imperfect in its nature from a moral 
point of view. For though a moral intention is 
essential to it, that intention alone will not produce 
it. Power is required, and power in this case is 
knowledge. Such knowledge is within the reach 
of persons devoid of any morality. A despicable 
character might quite well discover the secret of 
what we call gravitation. And though the applica- 
tion of such knowledge to human needs would be 
materially moral, i.e. it would coincide with the 
wider uniformities of human well-being, it might, 
in the mind of its discoverer, be without any such 
quality. It would then pass the objective test of 
social morality ; but it would lack that subjective 
sanction of conscious loyalty to ethical perception, 
without which there is for man no real morality 
whatever. The difficulty comes, not from the fact 
that there is no morality in the universe, for man 
is part of the universe and is moral ; but from the 
fact that the power of the universe is not moral. 
The maxim that knowledge is power may serve 
well enough in the class-room ; and power of a 
sort of course it is. But the power that is not 
knowledge, that recks nothing of its effects, 
envelops it as the ocean the drop of water. Ces 
espaces infinies meffraient ! And well they may ; 
for their profoundest depths in which lie the 
destinies of all of us, are void of mind or conscience. 



MAETERLINCK 115 

In his self-imposed task of the rationalisation and 
moralisation of his experience, Man is alone and, 
so far as he knows, unaided. On this point 
Maeterlinck does not hesitate. He eschews com- 
pletely the dialectical tours de force of liberalising 
theologians. The Kingdom of Heaven, our natural 
inheritance, is solely within us ; it exists only as 
an ideal, only in relation to human appreciation 
and discourse, that is, to our mind ; Justice, Mercy, 
Beauty, Truth, are so many secretions of human 
consciousness, as silk is of the silk-worm. 

In the antinomy between man's sense of justice 
and the indifference of the power which has brought 
him forth, our modern pessimists find the essential 
tragedy of humanity. 'A strange mystery it is,' 
said Mr. Bertrand Russell in a remarkable article 
published some years ago in the Independent 
Review} * that nature, omnipotent but blind, in 
the revolutions of her secular hurryings through 
the abyss of space, has brought forth, at last, 
a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with 
sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the 
capacity of judging the works of his unthinking 
mother.' 

But is not such pessimism based rather on 
mythology than fact ; is it not, after all, but an 
after-effect of supernaturalism ? For Nature is 

1 Independent Review, Dec. 1903, 'The Free Man's Worship.' 



116 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

no mother from whom we spring ; rather she comes 
to birth in our brain. It is only under the action 
of mind, and in relation thereto, that the term 
acquires either unity or value. Nature as a term 
of discourse, to which predicable values can be 
assigned, exists only in the same purely ideal 
manner as Truth, Beauty and Justice. The 
generalisations by means of which we organise 
what we call ' external,' are in our mind no less 
1 ideal ' than those we employ in the construction 
of moral values ; their locus is different, that is all. 
The Ideal is as natural as the Natural is ideal. 
It will nevertheless be said that, whether the 
universe be the child of our brain or we its pro- 
duct, makes no difference practically ; equally the 
facts of experience are there, and we have to deal 
with them. It is amid those facts, the determina- 
tion of which is beyond our conscious control, that 
our destiny is laid. Quite so ; and it is from what 
is known of the human process, of the way in 
which man has dealt with these facts, in the past, 
that a sober and reasonable hope may be derived 
for the future. In one of his finest essays, Les 
Rameaux dOliviers, Maeterlinck states calmly his 
grounds for such hope. His argument there is, 
briefly, that such enormous difficulties, such terrible 
dangers, are now overcome, that we need not 
despair of the future. The law of man's progress 



MAETERLINCK 117 

has been the growth of his knowledge of his 
environment, which at first indeed appears hostile, 
but which, at the magic touch of human will and 
brain, shows itself more and more plastic. It is 
as if Nature were coming gradually to recognise 
her master, in proportion as that master enters by- 
degrees into the kingdom of reason implicit in his 
consciousness. Man is, on the whole, wiser and 
better ; civilisation, inadequate as its actual realisa- 
tion may be, is, on the whole, more securely 
established than ever before on the planet ; and 
the vistas of knowledge open more widely, more 
surely, more radiantly. If anything be needed to 
turn the balance of abstract consideration, we are 
justified in trusting to that indomitable courage, to 
that unflagging resolution of the human will, to 
realise by its creative power the ideals of the 
spirit which has brought us so far on our long 
pilgrimage. 

I would venture to add a consideration which 
Maeterlinck nowhere explicitly mentions, although 
it seems to be implied in much that he says. By 
hypothesis Man is no supernatural being fallen 
from above into the universe. From the point of 
view of science, he is the result of the forces that 
at an earlier stage produced less complex manifesta- 
tions of life. Does not this belief, instead of 
making for pessimism, as so many seem to think, 



118 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

rather furnish a strong ground for hope ? If his 
origin were supernatural, then indeed Man might 
find himself at perpetual variance with his environ- 
ment. But if he is himself the product of that 
environment, must not the equilibrium without 
which he could neither have appeared nor have 
maintained himself in existence come at length to 
express itself in the harmony of his consciousness ? 
Maeterlinck is certainly one of those who con- 
tribute towards the grounds for thinking so, mainly 
by the exquisite single-mindedness with which he 
approaches the moral question, and which he in- 
evitably communicates to a sympathetic reader. 
Not perhaps, since Pascal, has a European thinker 
vindicated so suggestively, so convincingly, the 
true dignity of the human intellect, the moral 
qualities inevitably inherent in the formation of 
opinion. And it is with those great words of 
Pascal, which so aptly resume the value of Maeter- 
linck as a moralist, that I will bring this essay to 
a close : ' All our dignity consists then in thought. 
It is from thought that we should take our point 
of departure, not from space or duration, which we 
can in nowise fill. Let us therefore labour to 
think correctly : that is the principle of morality/ 



ANATOLE FRANCE 119 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

1 The longer I contemplate human life, the more I 
believe that we must give it, for witnesses and 
judges, Irony and Pity, even as the Egyptians 
evoked over their dead the goddesses I sis and 
Nephtis. Irony and Pity are two good counsellors. 
The one smiles and makes life amiable ; the other 
weeps and makes it sacred. The irony which I 
invoke is not cruel. It mocks neither love nor 
beauty. It is gentle and kind. Its laugh calms 
anger ; and it teaches us to smile at wicked men 
and fools whom, without it, we might have the 
weakness to hate/ 

These are the words of a wise man and of a 
good man. They are, in addition, the profession 
of faith of perhaps the first living writer of French 
prose. M. Anatole France, the creator of Sylvestre 
Bonnard, of the Abbe Jerome Coignard, of M. 
Bergeret, and of other charming companions of 
the hours snatched from those dreamlike futilities 
which make up what we call real life, is not only a 
writer of fiction. I do not like to say that he is 



120 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

greater than that, lest, in the event of these lines 
ever reaching the Master's eye, I should provoke a 
certain quiet smile, which, envisaged in imagination 
only, may well give the critic pause. At least I 
may be permitted to say that he is more than that. 
He is an historian of no common erudition ; he is 
a poet ; he is a philosopher. 

The last qualification may be disputed. Since 
that birthday of philosophy on which our distant 
ancestor first observed that all serpents had more 
in common than of differentiation, philosophers 
have disagreed, not only on the proper way to 
conduct their business, but as to the precise nature 
of the business itself. Mr. Webster tells us that 
philosophy is ' the love of, including the search for, 
wisdom ' : thus revealing, in a phrase, the paradox 
at the core of every true philosophers heart. For 
he loves what he has not found, what, doubtless, no 
man will ever find. He rises early and rests late, 
and diligently sweeps his house, like the woman in 
the parable ; but that precious penny still eludes 
his subtlest search. The wisest are those who, 
recognising this, find their account in so seemingly 
untoward a circumstance. 

It can hardly be doubted that if, in an ill-advised 
moment, it were to occur to the high gods to repair 
their blunders by admitting man to the comprehen- 
sion of their eternal counsels, the day that they 



ANATOLE FRANCE 121 

did so would mark the beginning of the end of 
humanity. Thought would cease, and man would 
slowly begin with listless tread, to descend the 
angel-guarded ladder of flame which reaches from 
the earth of his origin to the heaven of his 
aspiration. And the place of his alighting would 
be no Bethel ; it would be the primitive hole on 
the hillside, which, not so very long ago, he shared 
with rat and wolf. For curiosity is the mother 
of wisdom, last and most gratuitous, yet most 
essential of man's inventions ; while life only 
maintains itself in virtue of a constant effort to 
surpass its achievement. Of these wisest philo- 
sophers is the subject of this essay. 

M. France is of the line of the great sceptics, the 
salt of whose questionings has never been wanting 
to freshen the stream of human speculation. Far 
back that lineage stretches to legendary Pyrrho 
and fabled Kapila, and doubtless far beyond them 
again ; for Doubt and Thought are the twin 
springs of the mind. The habit and aspect of the 
sceptic vary from age to age. He has, as a 
philosopher, no quarrel with the apparent values 
of experience ; rather, with more than Protean 
ingenuity, he welcomes them all in turn. Let the 
banquet of life be as varied, as sumptuous, as 
delicate as possible ; soon enough the cup must be 
turned down and the garland doffed. 



122 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again — 
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane ; 
How oft hereafter, rising, look for us — 
Through this same garden and, for one, in vain ! 

Meanwhile that moon shines on Rose-in-hand's 
lips and eyes ; and the scent of the night is on her 
hair and arms. Nor are these the only values of 
life. In an attic of a dormer-roofed, seventeenth- 
century Dutch house, sits a man still in the prime of 
life. He has left both his tables, the one strewed 
with manuscripts, the other with optical instru- 
ments, to watch a spider's duel. To a close 
observer, the brightness of his eye, the flush on his 
cheek surely indicate the mortal disease which in a 
year or two will cut him off. On the termination of 
the fight he returns to his desk, and writes the 
words : ' The free man thinks of nothing less than 
of death.' The calm peace of his expression, 
shining through the ravages of disease, shows that 
his heart is set on the love of the Eternal, the 
contemplation of which brings nothing but pure 
joy. Again. In a ravine of the Umbrian high- 
lands kneels a man, clothed in ash-coloured sack- 
cloth. His eyes red with weeping, are fixed on a 
roughly fashioned crucifix ; his hands clasped in 
prayer, and his bare feet — O miracle of love ! — are 
pierced and bedewed with blood. A wounded doe 
lies close, with broken leg deftly bound up by the 



ANATOLE FRANCE 123 

Saint's art, watching her master with liquid eye. 
She does not understand the meaning of his sighs 
and tears, but, being fain to comfort him, pokes, 
from time to time, a foolish tender muzzle among 
the folds of his robe. The Saint turns with a 
smile, and caresses his little friend ; and the blood, 
which symbolises the ransom of mankind, stains 
her white-starred forehead, innocent alike of sin 
and redemption. Who shall estimate the rapture 
of that man ? Also who, asks the sceptic, shall 
determine, without fear of gainsaying, whether the 
Persian reveller, Spinoza or St. Francis, be nearer 
to the truth of things ? 

Just as the sceptic looks with philosophic impar- 
tiality on the differing manifestations of life con- 
tained in the bosom of universal Nature, so also 
there is nothing in his system to prevent his 
adoption, for personal use, of such manifestations 
as may seem to him especially worthy. 

According as heredity, circumstances, personal 
taste may dictate, he will be a voluptuary or an 
ascetic, a reactionary or a revolutionary, irreligious 
or devout. But in no case will he pay himself with 
words. If, for instance, he be devout, he will not 
attempt to sophisticate his mind or dim his soul 
with the fancied pros and cons of the case : he 
will frankly recognise his temperamental need of 
religion, and boldly rest his faith on those reasons 



124 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

of the heart of which the reason is ignorant, and 
which, however respectable as motives, are, in truth, 
as he well knows, no reasons at all. Of M. France 
it may be said that, though hardly to be called 
devout, he has certainly engaged himself ' on the 
side of the angels.' 

Anatole Francois Thibault (the name ' France ' 
is a pseudonym) was born in Paris in 1844. ' It 
seems to me impossible,' he says in his Livre de 
Mon Ami, the charming autobiography of his 
childhood, ' to have quite a commonplace mind if 
one has been brought up on the quays of Paris, in 
front of the Louvre and the Tuileries, near the 
Palais Mazarin, in front of the glorious Seine, 
flowing between the towers and turrets of old 
Paris.' His father, M. Noel Thibault, a well- 
known bibliophile, followed that most fascinating 
pursuit, the second-hand book trade. He was no 
ordinary bookseller, but employed his great know- 
ledge in the collection of rare volumes. The talk 
of his father's friends provided a literary atmosphere 
for Anatole's childhood. Thus he learned the 
elements of the religion of books which, even in its 
fetichistic stage only, has consoled so many. His 
mother, towards whom he practised that culte de la 
ma mere which is so fine and general a note of the 
French character, was a simple and devout person, 
of warm heart and great good sense. It was her 



ANATOLE FRANCE 125 

love, no doubt, that fostered that intensely human 
quality which was later to become so marked a 
characteristic of M. France's work at his best. 
Mme. Thibault would read saints' lives to the little 
Anatole with, on one occasion, somewhat surprising 
results. The episode is related in the Livre de 
Mon Ami. 

My mother used often to read to me the Lives of the 
Saints, to which I listened with delight, and which rilled 
my soul with surprise and love. I knew now how the 
men of the Lord managed to make their lives precious 
and full of merit ; I knew the celestial fragrance diffused 
by the roses of martyrdom. But martyrdom was an 
extremity on which I did not decide. Nor did I dwell 
on the apostolate or on preaching which were hardly 
within my reach. I confined myself to austerities as 
being both easy and sure. In order to abandon myself 
to them without delay, I refused to eat my breakfast. 
My mother, who did not at all understand my new 
vocation, thought I was ill, and looked at me with an 
uneasiness which distressed me. But none the less I 
continued to fast. Then, recollecting St. Simon Stylites, 
who lived on the top of a column, I climbed on to the 
kitchen pump ; but I could not live there, because Julia, 
the servant, promptly took me down. Having descended 
from my pump, I ardently rushed forward on the road of 
perfection and determined to imitate St. Nicholas of 
Patras, who distributed his riches to the poor. The 
window of my father's study overlooked the quay. I 
threw out of his window a dozen coppers which had been 
given me because they were new and shining; then I 
hurled out my marbles and tops and my big peg top with 
its eel-skin whip. 



126 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

' This child is idiotic ! ' exclaimed my father, shutting 
the window. I experienced anger and shame at hearing 
myself judged in this way. But I reflected that my 
father, not being a saint like myself, would not share with 
me in the glory of the blessed ; and this thought was a 
great consolation to me. 



St. Theresa's childish dreams of martyrdom were 
shattered by contact with reality in the shape of a 
Philistine uncle. Anatole France's youthful aspira- 
tions after sanctity — he told his mother that he 
longed to write after his name Ermite et Saint du 
Calendrier, in emulation of the honorific suffixes 
which took so much room on his father's visiting 
cards — were dissolved by the even pressure, as one 
might say, by the force of inertia of the kindly 
irresponsive domestic atmosphere. Sanctity as a 
career was a failure ; but the child was too 
thoroughly imbued with the national passion for 
' la ofloire ' not to seek some other means of self- 
illustration. After all his unregenerate father, 
though heaven was closed to him, enjoyed much 
respect, and could write any number of ' soul- 
enhancing' epithets after his name. Perhaps his 
interests might furnish materials for a career. So 
the future Academician came to conceive his first 
literary project : that of writing a history of France 
in fifty volumes. At the moment of this resolution 
he was still of tender years, so tender, in fact, that 



ANATOLE FRANCE 127 

he would weep when his nurse attended to such 
elementary details of his toilet as his nose. More- 
over, he could not read. But, as he had already 
intuitively divined, material difficulties or even 
impossibilities do not operate in the same order of 
things as the idea. It may be well to add that 
these fifty volumes have never existed save sub 
specie aeternitatis. If space permitted, I could 
linger much longer over this charming book, 
written in the perfection of M. France's style, in 
the maturity of his genius ; it was published in 
1885. It is an unusually happy specimen of the 
genre Confessions. The fresh ingenuousness of its 
manner is rare enough in autobiography. 

As he grew older, his father sent him to the 
well-known College Stanislaus. Here that taste 
for Greek and Roman antiquity, which has through 
life meant so much to him, declared itself unmistak- 
ably. He was fascinated by Sophocles and Virgil. 
Not altogether, however, in a way agreeable to his 
professors. The boy was a dreamer, and loved to 
wander down those bypaths of scholarship which 
do not lead to success in examinations. He tells 
us that his 'Latin prose contained solecisms.' 
Another cause of his unpopularity with his teachers 
was his strongly marked inclination to elude the 
religious discipline which was so accentuated a 
feature of Mgr. Dupanloup's educational system. 



128 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

As he said at Treguier, of Renan, his mind realised 
very quickly the difficulties of belief. Or rather, 
perhaps, his imaginative outlook was rilled up and 
contented by the great figures of classical antiquity 
in a way which left no void for religion to fill. 
He says, to quote once more from the Livre 
de Mon Ami : — 

I saw Thetis, rising like a white cloud over the sea. 
I saw Nausicaa and her companions, and the palm-tree 
of Delos, and the sky and the earth, and the ocean, and 
Andromache smiling through her tears. ... I understood. 
I felt. It was impossible for me for six months to put 
down the Odyssey. 

The ancient gods had forestalled their successor ; 
Anatole France as a child was aninta naturaliter 
pagana. 

M. France commenced author with a small 
volume of verse called Vers Dove's, under the 
aegis of Leconte de Lisle. But the orthodoxy 
of Parnassus soon became too strait for him ; and 
the great man does not seem to have taken in 
good part the heresies and, at last, the complete 
defection of his brilliant but too individualist 
disciple. Poetry, however, of which he has always 
remained an ardent lover and penetrating critic, 
was not to him a really authentic means of self- 
expression. He had the faculty of writing verse, 
as most great literary artists have ; but prose was 



ANATOLE FRANCE 129 

the medium most fitted for his essentially medita- 
tive and discursive nature. He soon produced 
his Thais, a veritable poem in prose, in which 
the luxurious tones of Byzantine decadence were 
artfully married with the bleak ascetic values of 
the Egyptian desert. M. France has always had 
a weakness for monachism, and has frequently 
returned to the subject. 

The work which first really called on him the 
attention of the public was Le Crime de Sylvestre 
Bonnard, published in 1881, which was crowned 
by the Academy. In this delightful book, France 
recreated the type of the old savant whose innocent 
egotism is qualified by a more than average dose 
of human kindness. The reader will not expect 
to be taken through a catalogue raisonnd of M. 
France's work. One may say briefly, that he has 
written a great deal, and hardly anything except, 
perhaps, if the criticism may be ventured, Le Lys 
Rouge and the Histoire Comique, that is without 
the peculiar and intimate charm that has come to 
be associated with his name. 

It is in La Rotisserie de la Reine Pddauque and 
its sequel, Les Opinions de M. J drome Coignard, 
that he has succeeded in expressing himself 
supremely. In these books his fantasy and (an 
enemy would say) his sophistry are suffused with 
so rich a glow of kindly humanity as to be quite 

1 



130 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

irresistible. We may disapprove of the Abbe 
Coignard : it is our right as law-abiding citizens 
and respectable churchmen to do so ; but it is 
impossible even to think of him without secret 
joy. Poor M. Jerome! so great and so little, 
so noble and so vile, who forgets his cassock 
in the tavern, and his priesthood in the arms of 
the ' fern me de chambre de Madame la Baillive'; 
who discourses of morals with the eloquence of 
Seneca, yet cheats at cards and pilfers jewels; 
who combines the most daring flights of specula- 
tion with the simplicity of true Christian faith ; 
and who, after a vagabond existence among 
wenches and pot-boys, eked out, according to 
circumstances, by deciphering Egyptian manu- 
scripts or writing love-letters for maid-servants, 
finally dies a holy and edifying death from the 
effects of a wound received in the course of a 
disreputable adventure — what are we to say of 
him, and why do we love him ? The reason of 
our love is not far to seek. And we may turn for 
it to a doctor of the Abbe Coignard's communion. 
In the Dream of Gerontius, Cardinal Newman 
sums up the balance sheet of a man as : — 

Majesty dwarfed to baseness, poisonous flower running to 

seed; 
Who never art so near to crime and shame 
As when thou hast achieved some deed of name. 



ANATOLE FRANCE 131 

We love M. Jerome Coignard because he is a 
living, sensible epitome of humanity, of our own 
hearts. Thus and thus are we, though it may 
not suit us to admit the fact. And, oddly enough, 
in spite of this invincible disinclination, the vicarious 
unveiling of our own hearts gives us a pleasure of 
a most delightful quality, such epicures in moral 
sensation have we become. It gives us the illusion 
of the confession we shall never make, of the 
sincerity we shall never achieve. And the illusion 
also of that peace of heart, which, as theologians 
assure us, is the accompaniment and reward of 
true contrition. So we have ample motives for 
loving M. Jerome Coignard. This great and 
good man, at once philosopher and hedge priest, 
a splendid toper and an accomplished scholar, is 
first introduced to ns in the roasting shop of 
Leonard Menetrier, who plies his laudable trade 
in the Rue St. Jacques, at the sign of La Reine 
PJdauque. Here the Abbe finds his daily cover 
laid in return for the instructions which he gives 
the roaster's son Jacques, commonly called Tourne- 
broche, in virtue of the office which he shares 
with the dog Miraut. This Jacques becomes his 
master's devoted disciple and biographer. We 
will not follow them through their adventures, 
which include the frequentation of a charming 
and crazy hermetic philosopher (an admirably 



132 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

reconstructed eighteenth-century type), some 
incidental fighting, and more than one episode 
of the kind that, in France, legitimately adds to 
the gaiety of life, and, in England, is never 
mentioned. Let us, rather, briefly dwell on the 
ideas conveyed by these delightful books. They 
represent, with the conversations of M. Bergeret 
in the four volumes of the Histoire Contemporaine, 
the ripest moods of M. Frances philosophy, a 
philosophy which, due allowance being made for 
temperamental variations — the inevitable sanction 
of which is one of its principal charms — is held, 
in substance, by many of the best minds in Europe 
to-day. 

I have already indicated the school of thought 
to which M. France belongs. He is of the 
great school of Elis, the school of Pyrrho. With 
the nuance, however, of his time. He has expressly 
told us, in his answer to M. Brunetiere, who had 
attacked him as a mere subjectivist, self-dispensed 
from the arduous labour of exact knowledge, that 
he believes in ' the relativity of things and the 
succession of phenomena ' : that is in science. M. 
France believes then in science ; but let not 
dogmatists of any kind, even those who frequent 
the Royal Institution, presume to hail him as a 
fellow. ' What,' asks the Abbe Coignard, ' is the 
knowledge of Nature but the fantasy of our 



ANATOLE FRANCE 133 

senses ? ' This is discouraging ; and it seems as 
if the saintly immobility, the blessed ataraxy of 
the fakir, would be the practical translation of 
such an attitude. On the contrary, no man is 
more interested in life than he. No detail of 
humanity's long pilgrimage escapes his affectionate 
curiosity. His faithful love of men and their 
doings is, rather than the mere abstract passion 
of erudition, at the bottom of his ceaseless interest 
in history. The fact is that the teachings of 
Pyrrho are at once reinforced in his mind, and 
qualified by those of another Greek philosopher, 
the divine Epicurus. 

Walter Savage Landor used to say that we 
should walk through life with Epicurus on the 
one hand and Epictetus on the other. In a 
similar vein M. France says that the former 
philosopher and St. Francis of Assisi are the 
two best friends — and mutual correctives — that 
humanity has found on its path through the 
world. The Stoic rigour is alien to his temperate 
and kindly wisdom : * II ne faut pas exagerer le 
mal que Ton fait.' Rather would he extol the 
golden moderation of the garden philosopher, and 
dwell on the Preachers advice not to be wise 
overmuch. The temper of that colony perched 
on ' a certain breezy tableland projecting from the 
African coast,' of which Mr. Pater has written so 



134 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

delightfully, is his. A true Cyrenaic, Horace's 
summing up of the philosophy of the founder of 
Cyrene may be justly applied to him : omnis 
Aristippum decuit color et status et res. 

Indeed, Aristippus is nearer to him than Pyrrho. 
The latter had thrown the universal doubt that lies 
coiled at the root of knowledge — 'the little dead 
red worm therein' — into a blank abstract interrog- 
ative ; but he, apparently, did not realise that life 
and speculation are two things, that, even though 
both we ourselves and the appearances that dance 
over our sensorium, are from the point of view of 
speculative analysis, but vain shadows together, 
that fact does not make them or us any less inter- 
esting, does not even tend to lower or qualify in 
any way their human value. For it is evident that 
that value springs wholly from the undeniable 
experience of relation ; what exactly is related to 
what is irrelevant. At least it is charitable to 
suppose that, when Pyrrho passed his master 
Aristarchus wailing for help in a ditch, on the 
ground that his unfortunate plight stood in need 
of metaphysical proof, he mixed up two things. 
And it is certainly impossible to imagine that 
M. France would have left Renan, his one master 
among moderns, in a ditch for such reasons. 

It is characteristic of M. France's detachment 
from popular, or iudeed any kind of polemics, that, 



ANATOLE FRANCE 135 

while he himself remains scrupulously, and it would 
seem unregretfully un-Christian, his most important 
philosophical protagonist should be a Catholic 
priest. No doubt he has expressed his personal 
attitude more fully in his Bergeret of the Histoire 
Contemporaine. But M. Bergeret is by no means 
so convincing or so attractive as M. Coignard. 
Dare one say it ? He is at times distinctly tedious. 
Whether it is that he suffers unduly from his sordid 
domestic surroundings, or from the stifling atmo- 
sphere of his gossiping little university, or from 
what strikes a foreign observer as the abject pro- 
vincialism of contemporary French public life, one 
certainly grows weary of him. Not so of M. Coig- 
nard. To him M. France has dispensed all his 
inimitable charm ; he has lavished on him the finest 
resources of his art. That he should have done so 
is, as I have said, characteristic of his detachment 
from popular causes ; it also surely indicates the 
exquisite fairness, the crystalline probity of his 
mind. Not thus are philosophers wont to treat 
philosophers who have the misfortune to differ 
from them. Schopenhauer — no doubt the case was 
exceptional — called Hegel by name and in print 
an 'intellectual Caliban' and a 'charlatan.' But to 
return to our Abbe! ; 

I cannot do better than make some quotations 
from M. France's own analysis of his hero : — 



136 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

I am not afraid to affirm that M. l'Abbe Coignard, 
philosopher and Christian, united in an incomparable 
combination the Epicureanism that preserves us from 
pain and the holy simplicity that leads us to joy. It is 
remarkable that, not only did he accept the idea of God 
as it was provided for him by the Catholic faith, but also 
that he endeavoured to maintain it by arguments of a 
rational order. He never imitated the practical ability 
of professional Deists who make, for their own use, a God, 
at once moral, philanthropic, and modest (pudique), with 
whom they enjoy the satisfaction of a perfect under- 
standing. The close relations which they establish with 
him procure for their writings a great deal of authority, 
and for their persons much consideration from the public. 
And this governmental God, moderate, solemn, free from 
all fanaticism, and who knows the world (qui a du monde), 
recommends them in assemblies, drawing-rooms, and 
academies. M. l'Abbe Coignard did not fashion to him- 
self so profitable an Eternal. But, reflecting that it is 
impossible to conceive of the universe, except under the 
categories of the intelligence, and that the Cosmos must 
be held to be intelligible, even in view of the demonstra- 
tion of its absurdity, he referred its cause to an intelli- 
gence which he called God, leaving to this term its infinite 
vagueness, while for the rest he went to theology, which, 
as we know, treats of the unknowable with a minute 
exactitude. This reserve which marks the limits of his 
intelligence was a happy one if, as I think, it removed 
from him the temptation to nibble at some appetising 
system of philosophy, and saved him from pushing his 
nose into one of those mouse-traps in which the emanci- 
pated spirits hasten to get caught. At his ease in the 
great old rat-hole, he found more than one issue through 
which to discover the world and observe nature. I do 
not share his religious beliefs, and I think that they 



ANATOLE FRANCE 137 

deceived him, as they have deceived for their happiness 
and misery so many generations of men. But it would 
seem that the ancient errors are less annoying than the 
modern ones, and that, since we must be deceived, the 
better part for us is to cling to the illusions which have 
lost their roughness. 

So much for the Abbe Coignard's metaphysic 
and theology. His attitude towards the latter was 
that of no less a thinker than Descartes, who placed 
his theology under the aegis of Pere Mersenne. 
Let us now hear M. France on his ethic. 

Never did human spirit show itself at once so bold 
and so pacific, or steep its disdain in greater sweetness. 
His ethic united the liberty of the cynical philosophers 
with the candour of the first friars of the holy Portiun- 
cula. He despised men with tenderness; he tried to 
teach them that the only side on which they had a little 
grandeur being a capacity for pain, the one useful and 
beautiful quality for them was pity ; that able only to 
desire and suffer, they should make to themselves indul- 
gent and voluptuous virtues. He thus came to consider 
pride the only source of the greatest evils, and the only 
vice contrary to nature. It would seem indeed that men 
make themselves miserable by the exaggerated feeling 
which they have for themselves and their kind, and that, if 
they had a humbler and truer idea of human nature, they 
would be gentler to each other and themselves. It was 
his benevolence which urged him to humiliate his fellows 
in their sentiments, their knowledge, their philosophy, and 
their institutions. He had it at heart to show them that 
their imbecile nature has neither imagined nor con- 
structed anything worthy of a very energetic attack or 
defence, and that, if they knew the fragility and sim- 



138 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

plicity of their greatest works, such as their laws and 
their empires, they would fight for them only in play and 
for fun, like children who build sand castles on the beach. 
Moreover, one should not be either astonished or scan- 
dalised at the fact that he abased all the ideas by which 
man exalts his glory and honour at the expense of his 
repose. The majesty of the law did not impose on his 
clear-sighted soul ; and he regretted that poor wretches 
should be subjected to so many obligations of which, in 
most cases, one can discover neither the origin nor the 
meaning. All principles seemed to him equally contest- 
able. He had come to believe that citizens only con- 
demned so many of their kind to infamy in order to 
enjoy by contrast the joys of public respect. This view 
made him prefer bad company to good, after the example 
of Him who lived among publicans and prostitutes. He 
preserved there purity of heart, the gift of sympathy, and 
the treasures of mercy. 

M. Coignard's philosophy showed to special 
advantage in his criticism of social justice, militar- 
ism, magistrates, police, and political institutions 
generally. Not one did his genial and mordant 
analysis leave standing. Yet he was no revolu- 
tionary. He was, as he said, like the old woman 
of Syracuse, who prayed for the preservation of 
the existing tyrant — the worst, she observed, that 
there had ever been — on the ground that a still 
worse one would surely succeed him. He seems 
to have believed in what human improvement he 
thought possible, on the ground of an ingenious 
application to moral and social matters of the law 



ANATOLE FRANCE 139 

of 'actual causes/ Sir Charles Lyell, as is known, 
maintained, some fifty years ago, that the various 
changes that have come about in the earth's surface 
during the course of the ages were not due, as was 
then commonly supposed, to sudden cataclysms, 
but to the gradual operation of slow and imper- 
ceptible causes, which to this day continue their 
silent invisible task of transforming the crust of the 
planet. M. Coignard seems to have applied the 
analogy of Lyell 's theory to the phenomena of 
social growth and development. For instance, he 
hated war, partly on moral grounds, and partly, 
no doubt, because, as Fontenelle said, it inter- 
rupted conversation. He looked forward to its 
disappearance, not as the result of any conscious 
effort of humanity, such as the forcible establish- 
ment of courts of arbitration and the like, but 
rather as the inevitable consequence of a perfect 
balance of power, to be brought about at last by 
the equalisation of the armaments of rival states. 
The evil would thus kill itself. Similarly, the 
absurdities of legal justice would at length reach 
such a point as gradually to melt away of them- 
selves before the irony of a human being, the son 
of our loins, rather more clear-sighted than his 
parents, but not in any way essentially differing 
from them. So, then, the Abbe Coignard believed 
in justice, and, so far, was no sceptic? Yes, he 



. 



140 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

believed in justice, and in • whatsoever things are 
of good report ' ; but he did not think that the 
home of these things was among men. Justice 
was to him the vanishing point of the perspective 
of human society, the ideal existence of which is 
necessarily implied in all human aspiration, while 
its achievement, as a fact, is as necessarily denied 
to all human effort. 

We may note here a profound difference between 
the Abbe Coignard's doctrine and that of the 
Revolution. That great movement in human 
affairs was based on the belief in the natural 
justice of Man. Condorcet is as clear on this 
point as Jean - Jacques. The Abbe Coignard 
would have said that man, being naturally unjust, 
tends obscurely and intermittently to improve him- 
self in the direction of justice, but that unjust he 
is by nature and unjust by nature he always will 
remain. He held no illusions about humanity. 
Had he been able, with prophetic mind, to gauge 
the great biological generalisation which has in 
modern times so profoundly modified all our 
thoughts concerning man and his destiny, there is 
little doubt that he would have sided with Darwin 
against Rousseau. His principal objection to the 
philosophy of the latter would have been that it 
assumed an unscientific difference of kind between 
the gorilla and its human descendant. So he may, 



ANATOLE FRANCE 141 

in a sense, be considered as the precursor of the 
modern retrograde dclaird. There is, at least, little 
doubt that were he among us to-day, the party 
represented by that superior person would on the 
whole have his approval. I do not, of course, 
mean that all its contemporary manifestations, par- 
ticularly in France, would have his support. 
Rather his sense of irony, not to mention his 
Christian charity, would detach him from not a 
few of its methods. But, on the whole, the atti- 
tude would have his approval. 

M. Bergeret in the Histoire Contemporaine is 
the other most important incarnation of M. France's 
thought. Here we have another type of sceptic. 
The Abbe Coignard had not much faith in men, 
but he had plenty of faith in God : and his ideal 
beliefs, far from dimming his vision of actuality, 
served, on the contrary, to make it keener. He 
whose trust was in the Eternal could afford to 
recognise to the full the absurdity of passing 
events. His religious faith kept his heart sound 
and his moral nature sweet and true to the essential 
norms of human instinct. He was pure in heart 
because he saw God. M. Bergeret did not see 
God, and in human life saw little else than a wilful 
mass of indecent absurdity. And in consequence 
M. Bergeret was unhappy. He did not merely 
suffer from passing low spirits. He was per- 



142 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

manently, radically, essentially unhappy. Never- 
theless in spite of his unhappiness, he is, in a sense, 
a more mature expression of his Creator's philo- 
sophy than the Abbe Coignard. 

That Anatole France is an individualist of the 
finest water is sufficiently evident from everything 
he has ever said or written. It is his nature to 
form his own opinions in his own way and solely 
for his own gratification. The vitality of his 
contribution is due to the intensity with which it 
expresses now this, now that aspect of his extra- 
ordinarily versatile personality. His method of 
criticism displayed more clearly in the four volumes 
of his Vie Littdraire than in his professedly 
imaginative work, is a significant self-revelation. 
It consists in a certain subtle and sympathetic 
penetration, which almost reaches the point of 
self-identification with his subject. It is in this 
way that he produces his illusion of objectivity. 
Thus, whether he is writing of Asiatic religions, 
contemporary literature, science or philosophy, his 
subject seems to be spontaneously yielding up its 
inmost secret to the compelling courtesy of his 
investigation as a flower yields its perfume to the 
caresses of the sun. For he treats all ideas with 
the uniform and exquisite politeness of the sceptic. 
Indeed his scepticism is an important part of his 
success as a critic. It is after all not until an idea 



ANATOLE FRANCE 143 

has ceased to be an ideal that it becomes a fruitful 
subject for criticism. 

Anatole France evidently represents a more 
developed, a more philosophical scepticism than 
any other writer noticed in these studies. His 
position is roughly that our only knowledge is 
science, and that that only knowledge ^besides, 
bearing solely on the relations of things, not on 
their nature, and, therefore, in no way dispelling 
our essential ignorance of them, is at any given 
point, owing to the progressive method by which 
we acquire it, more wrong than right. For the 
science of to-day so transforms that of yesterday 
as to make it false, and there will always be 
to-morrow to be counted with. Nevertheless the 
method of science, i.e. the application of the 
category of causation to the connections of pheno- 
mena, while telling us nothing whatever about 
their intimate nature or even their real existence, 
which it assumes and leaves for ever totally 
unexplained and unproved, is, subjectively speaking, 
the legitimate development of the instinct of 
knowledge. It is in scientific terms the Maw' of 
that instinct, which merely means that that is the 
way in which that instinct behaves when it reaches 
maturity. Behind this fact of our nature — for it is 
a psychological fact that so and not otherwise does 
our mind work — it is impossible to go. It is 



144 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

equally impossible to discuss its validity as a 
philosophical principle, for, in order to do so, we 
have to assume it : it is therefore but waste of 
breath either to attribute or deny to it metaphysical 
cogency. This fully developed scepticism is a 
very different matter from the scepticism of the 
eighteenth century. That movement emancipated 
the human mind from theology ; the sceptic of 
to-day is emancipated from the superstition of 
reason. The first emancipation leaves the mind 
anxious and ill at ease, at times a ready prey, on 
the rebound, for some new fashion of credulity, and 
if the intellectual character is too strongly knit to 
find a fancied peace in such a solution, suffering, in 
proportion to the emotional depth of a man's 
nature, must ensue. Merimee is a case in point. 
But when error is torn up by the roots, when the 
mind is emancipated from the illusion of reason no 
less than from that of theology, man begins at last 
to live. He acquiesces in the limitations of his 
cerebral convolutions, he is resigned to his lot. 
Nay, he comes to love it with all its defects, with 
all its drawbacks. ' Ma petitesse m'est chere ! ' 
cries M. France, and Nietzsche's 'Amor Fati ' is 
nothing but a more grandiloquent phrase for the 
same feeling. Accepting his destiny in no grudg- 
ing spirit, doing, that is cheerfully and with full 
connaissance de cause what in any case he must do, 



ANATOLE FRANCE 145 

the sceptic turns himself to the loving cultivation 
of human nature. And he finds his sufficient 
reward. For now a miracle happens. The sword 
of his intelligence, which snapped like a silvered 
lathe when employed on immensities and incom- 
prehensibilities, becomes, when turned to its true 
uses, a sure and tempered weapon in his hand. 
Art and science and the cautious betterment of 
human lot within the limits of human nature, are 
the appropriate objects on which his * Practical 
Reason ' exercises itself. 

There are those who see in the fact that M. 
France has devoted himself of late years to the 
furtherance of social justice a backsliding from his 
intellectual ideals. The criticism is, I think, a 
petty one. It is indeed legitimate to question the 
wisdom of his methods. We may reasonably 
doubt that the socialistic tendencies which he 
encourages will, if triumphant, produce what he 
hopes for, but that it is irrational for a sceptic to 
endeavour to make himself and his fellow- creatures 
more comfortable on this peculiar planet is itself 
the most irrational of propositions. A great living 
philosopher tells us, that even if we are all going to 
Hell next week it is worth while, in the interval, to 
read Robert Browning in preference to Robert 
Montgomery. Equally, whatever be the ultimate 
destiny of humanity, even if the phrase have, in 

K 



146 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

strict thought, no meaning, it is important that 
existing humanity should be as happy and success- 
ful as the nature of things permits. 

The belief in the universal flux of things, in the 
absence of any ascertainable moral or intellectual 
order in the world, has represented the conviction 
of some of the serenest and finest of human 
intelligences. It was the mental attitude of an 
Epicurus, a Democritus, a Montaigne, a Gassendi. 
M. France has put it before us once more with 
unrivalled clearness and beauty of expression, and 
with a modernity of touch that makes it move in 
our minds as an actual form of our own experience. 
The sheet lightning of his quiet irony illuminates 
it ; and the glow of his pity suffuses it with an 
irresistibly attractive humanity. To have rendered 
thus perfectly, with so fine and conscientious an 
art, his personal vision of life, gives him his 
supreme claim on our admiration, on our intelligent 
sympathy. The commerce of wisdom, we are told 
by the Preacher, is pleasant. Those who doubt it 
cannot do better than turn to the works of Anatole 
France. 



EPILOGUE 

NOTES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
DISILLUSION 1 

The faith in reason of the philosophers of the 
eighteenth century, however noble and socially 
beneficial an attitude, was not, and could not be, 
the permanent resting-place of the human mind. 
Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, to take three 
different types of eighteenth-century thinkers, were 
all agreed, in spite of their personal differences, on 
the point that the unfettered use of reason was all 
that was needed to place man in possession of 
truth and happiness. Their position involved two 
important a priori principles, emphatically articles 
of faith, not of reason ; and neither more nor less 
articles of faith than the fundamental tenets of the 

1 It need hardly be said that these ' Notes' are not intended as a 
formal exposition of the Philosophy of Disillusion. They are merely 
meant to suggest and illustrate certain positions which are more 
widely held to-day than those who do not hold them may think. 
Those who wish to study the subject in systematic detail cannot do 
better than refer to the works of M. Jules de Gaultier and of 
M. Remy de Gourmont, published by the Societe du Mercure de 
France, Paris. 

147 



148 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

Church. They assumed, prior to all investigation, 
the completely rational nature of reality, and the 
essential goodness of all men. The disillusion of 
these men was the result of the conquest of one 
faith by another. That is to say, it was not, 
properly speaking, a fundamental disillusion. 
Faith in man took the place of faith in God, 
Paradise became the ultimate state of society to 
which reason was tending, Providence, when 
science came to eke out their conceptions, became 
evolution, God became immanent in and indis- 
tinguishable from man ; and, in the case of the 
true devotees of humanity, the religious symphony 
was merely transferred into another key. 

There was thus a symbolic fitness in the worship 
of the Goddess of Reason on the dismantled altar 
of Notre Dame. The Altar, the principle of 
religion, remained, it was only the object of worship 
that was changed. The well-meaning people who 
organised that remarkable function, like their 
earliest predecessors in the attempt to destroy 
Christianity, knew not what they did. Had they 
pushed their philosophical analysis so far as to 
criticise their new deity, they would have realised 
that it was no more unreasonable to worship the 
Sacred Host of Christian tradition, than an un- 
usually stout courtesan. That analysis indeed, had 
they but known it, was already, in its essentials, 



EPILOGUE 149 

complete. The Critique of Pure Reason had 
appeared twelve years before the apotheosis of 
Mile. Candeille. 

The work of Kant was of the most revolutionary 
description. In the course of his Transcendental 
Dialectic, he refutes the ontological proof of the 
existence of God, the argument of St. Anselm, 
Descartes and Leibnitz. He equally shows the 
inanity of the other two traditional arguments, the 
physico-theological and the cosmological, which had 
been the mainstay of the philosophy of the Catholic 
Schools. On the other hand, the antitheses in the 
second and third Antinomies show the impossibility 
of the existence of a simple substance, and conse- 
quently of the soul, in the theological sense of the 
term, and destroy the possibility of human liberty 
in an ordered universe. The main theses of the 
philosophers of the French enlightenment were 
thus pricked. Most of them, indeed, were Deists, 
and even the Atheists required a moral Absolute. 
Kant's intellect, however, was one thing, and his 
temperament another. The evangelical Christian 
could not endure the conclusions of the philosopher, 
and the Critique of Practical Reason laboured to 
restore the spiritualist positions of which the first 
Critique had made short work. Resuming the 
conclusions of the first Critique in the proposi- 
tion that God, Freedom and Immortality were 



'"/ 



150 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

indemonstrable, and therefore unknowable to Pure 
Reason, Kant here insists on their ' practical ' 
truth, which, when analysed, comes to mean that 
it is wise for creatures situated as we are to believe 
them to be true. 

At the side of the great metaphysical poems 
of Fichte, Hegel, Lotze and other minor post- 
Kantian thinkers, the philosophy of disillusion has 
pursued its course through the nineteenth century 
from the Critique of Pure Reason through 
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche. It has consisted in 
the development of Kant's idealism into a purely 
subjective phenomenalism. To put its main con- 
clusion less technically, it has shown, not from 
abstract considerations but by means of an analysis 
of the act of knowledge as it occurs in our experi- 
ence, that thought cannot transcend the strictly 
relative co-ordination of experience. The Absolute 
Realities, which form the theme of the various 
dogmatic systems which derive directly or indirectly 
from Platonism, it has shown (incompletely in the 
Critique of Pure Reason ; with completeness in 
Schopenhauer's Fozirfold Root of the Principle of 
Sufficient Reason) to be nothing but the lenses 
through which the faculty of knowledge represents 
to itself the notion of external existence. The 
important discovery of Schopenhauer was not the 
oriental myth of the self-realising and the self- 



EPILOGUE 151 

annihilating Will of the World, but his simple and 
irrefutable statement that the act of knowledge 
betrayed on analysis its own relativity, consisting, 
as it necessarily did, of the representation of an 
object for a subject, thus implying an essential 
dualism. From this impregnable position it was 
easy to show that the doctrine of an absolute 
knowledge identified in its inmost nature with 
absolute being involved a meaningless proposition. 
The roots of Theism, as a philosophical explana- 
tion of the world, were cut away. M. Jules de 
Gaultier, who represents better than any contem- 
porary the Philosophy of Disillusion to-day, has 
pointed out in his excellent book, De Kant a 
Nietzsche, that Kant, while preparing the way for 
Schopenhauer's theological Nihilism, had, even in 
the first Critique, endeavoured to cover his own 
traces. ' What Kant is careful not to say,' observes 
M. de Gaultier, ' no matter how strong the evidence 
which constrains him to say it, is that the idea of a 
First Cause, taken as a transcendental concept, is, 
in the highest degree, one of those concepts which 
are formed in contradiction to the laws of reason, 
and which have only to be formulated to be dis- 
avowed. Reason furnishes us with the principle of 
causality, with which to arrange the phenomenal 
world : everything which exists, exists in virtue of 
a cause. A cause then being a thing which exists, 



152 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

the right deduction, in order to manifest the prin- 
ciple in its blinding light, is that every cause has a 
cause. That is the principle of reason which must 
not be transgressed, and which the idea of a First 
Cause, a cause without a cause, directly violates.' 
And M. de Gaultier goes on to observe, with a 
lucidity which many philosophers might envy : 
' When the reason seeks an explanation of the 
universe, it goes without saying that that explana- 
tion must be intelligible to the reason. The 
intelligence is in a state of ignorance before the 
mystery, the question of the reason demands a 
reply which shall dissipate that ignorance. Now 
to attempt to dissipate that ignorance by the 
application of the principle of causality in its 
legitimate form to the Whole of phenomena, con- 
sidered as the effect of a cause situated outside 
that Whole, is, on the one hand, a kind of 
anthropomorphism, but, above all, it explains no- 
thing, because the form of the principle of causality 
will forthwith oblige the mind to seek for the cause 
of that cause outside the world, remounting in- 
definitely in the void from cause to cause. If, in 
order to obviate this inconvenience, theology forms 
the concept of a First Cause, no more real explana- 
tion is given, for the addition of a word cannot 
change the nature of reason, and make intelligible 
what was unintelligible before : mystery is not 



EPILOGUE 153 

explained by the incomprehensible. ... To explain 
the existence of the universe by means of this 
concept is to propose to the reason to admit that 
two plus two equals five, and to insinuate that at 
the price of that concession hitherto insoluble 
problems can be solved.' M. de Gaultier relates 
this divergent branching of Kant's intellect and 
temperament to what he considers to be the general 
law of philosophical development, and which is, at 
least, a more than ingenious hypothesis. It is this. 
The Vital Instinct and the Instinct of Knowledge, 
far from being the allies that popular educational- 
ists proclaim them to be, are at secret war with 
each other. The Vital Instinct expresses itself at 
the origin of one of those groups of human beings 
that we call a race, in a collection of moral, 
physical and mental attitudes, that have nothing to 
do with the question of truth, but that represent 
more or less successfully the conditions of its 
durability and power to the extent to which the 
race is conscious of them at that moment. These 
prescriptions are the work of a law-giving priest- 
hood, and are codified in religious forms, that is, 
in taboos. It seems an acquired fact that they are 
always represented as the teaching of revelation, 
never as the result of observation or knowledge. 
In process of time, the Instinct of Knowledge 
awakes in some sceptic, whose vitality is declining, 



154 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

and if he cannot be suppressed, he has to be 
answered. And now occurs a curious inversion of 
roles. The Vital Instinct disguises itself as the 
Instinct of Knowledge, and if unable to save the 
old myth, promptly invents a new one to take its 
place. In an advanced community, where an 
appeal to reason is implied in all propositions, the 
myth is philosophical rather than crudely natural- 
istic in construction. But it is no less a myth, that 
is, a transposition into such terms of reality, as the 
community is prepared imaginatively to accept, of 
the vital needs of the moment. M. de Gaultier 
illustrates this thesis by an analysis of the dogma 
of Monotheism. The dogma consists of belief in 
a God, external to the world, who is its creator, 
revealing, either miraculously, by infringing the 
determinism elsewhere observable, or naturally, by 
inspiration in human consciousness, a moral law, 
i.e. a good to practise and an evil to avoid. It 
involves also the belief in man's free will, by means 
of which he is capable of observing or disobeying 
the law, thus incurring merit or demerit, and 
deserving punishment or reward. Monotheism 
springs, historically speaking, from two distinct 
roots, Judaism and the philosophy of Plato. In 
its purely religious form, that of direct revelation, 
it represents the categorical imperative of the Vital 
Instinct, asserting itself in a manner beyond any 



EPILOGUE 155 

question of rational proof. It is so because life is 
so, not because we think it to be so. It is otherwise 
with Monotheism considered as a philosophical 
explanation of the world. In this case proof is 
required, and it is here that M. de Gaultier detects 
the deforming effect of the Vital Instinct on the 
mechanism of the intellect. 

The enigma of knowledge presents itself under 
a triple aspect to Plato. There is first the scientific 
question, how do we know external objects ? Then 
there are the two other categories of objects, those 
of the moral and those of the metaphysical world, 
already created in a rudimentary fashion by the 
Vital Instinct, which demands that the philosopher 
should complete the work begun. These objects, 
being the creation of the mind, are, of course, very 
easy to handle. They are not under the control 
of space or time ; never appearing in the 
phenomenal world, which cannot exist except in 
space and time, they can easily brave any possible 
refutation from experience. It is easy to believe 
them to be of the same nature as the intelligence 
which conceives them ; then, all that is necessary 
is once for all to declare them endowed with exist- 
ence, outside as well as within the mind. The ruse 
here, consists in the fact that the mind being un- 
able to explain the fact of knowledge by the fact 
of existence, quietly reverses the terms of the 



156 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

problem, and attributes to knowledge the power to 
create being. It is exactly the same process, in 
the intellectual sphere, as that of primitive man 
constructing his idols, and then persuading himself 
that he owes to them his own existence. 

The whole of this process, when it is dealing 
with the objects of the moral or metaphysical 
world, is, as has been said, beyond the possibility 
of experimental verification or refutation. The 
vagueness of content of these objects, compared 
to the definiteness of the objects of the external 
world, is also a further protection to the vicious 
construction of the process. Let us observe it at 
work on the fundamental problem of knowledge ; 
how do we know of the existence of external 
objects in the phenomenal world ? 

The knowledge of an object, says the Platonic 
Socrates, supposes that a definition can be given 
of it, and to define is to classify and limit under 
the category of a general idea. But this general 
idea, which confers on the object knowable exist- 
ence, does not itself belong to the object. Nor 
can it be derived from the senses which give us, 
at the most, very incomplete information about 
objects. Where will Plato find the locus of these 
ideas, the necessary intermediaries of our know- 
ledge ? Not in human reason, for they are, he says, 
its objects, being independent of human reason, in 



EPILOGUE 157 

the same way as external objects are independent 
of the senses. It is in the Divine Reason, of which 
they are the attributes, that these ideas, the eternal 
types of the particular objects, perceived by the 
senses, have their real and substantial existence. 
This is the doctrine of the Platonic Ideas, and if the 
greatness of philosophic doctrines is to be measured 
by their influence and duration, it is undoubtedly 
one of the greatest. It is still, after twenty-four 
centuries, the ill-disguised backbone of all absolute 
metaphysic, and the substance of all theology, 
which claims, in any sense, to incorporate reason. 

From the point of view of logic, it is, however, 
singularly vulnerable. I know the dog of Alci- 
biades by means of the idea of dog, I proceed 
in abstraction to the idea of a mammal, from that 
to the idea of an animal in general, from that to the 
idea of existence in general. But does on that 
account existence in general exist ? Is there out- 
side my mind an object which can be called 
existence in general? Evidently not. Existence 
abstracted from any particular existence, is nothing 
but a category of the mind indispensable to the 
representation of external objects, all of which are 
said to exist, because the act of knowledge 
necessarily groups them under that category in 
itself nothing but a pure mental form. 

This quiproquo, by means of which thought adds 



158 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

to its legitimate function of regulating reality the 
pretension to create it, is, as has been said, the 
source of all religious philosophy, it is also at the 
bottom of all philosophy that implies the recogni- 
tion of any other than a purely phenomenal value 
in phenomena. All schemes of ' progress ' that 
represent experience as moving by its own nature 
towards the realisation of an intellectual or a moral 
absolute, depend upon it. Even Pragmatism, the 
fashion of the moment, in spite of its jaunty dis- 
claimer of metaphysic, is, at least, its illegitimate 
descendant. 

Philosophy, like the kingdom of Heaven, has 
rarely been sought for its own sake alone, and the 
consequences of philosophical disillusion extend 
further than the purely intellectual domain. I 
have said that to refuse to admit the creation of 
reality by thought excludes the belief in the exist- 
ence of absolute values in experience. Morality, 
in the sense that it has commonly been understood 
during the reign of the Platonic Ideas, must go. 
Kant's miraculous Categorical Imperative is an 
empty phrase, bombinans in vacuo, not so much 
false as entirely meaningless. Conduct appeals 
primarily to utility, secondarily to taste, virtue 
recovers its etymological meaning and becomes 
again the virtus of the Romans. We appreciate 
human beings, like wines, by their qualities. If 



EPILOGUE 159 

their behaviour is hostile to a few obviously 
recognised utilities we call them criminals, and 
suppress or shut them up if we can. At a further 
stage of discrimination, if we find them unattractive, 
we avoid them — if we are wise. There is no 
mystery about this. Here, if anywhere, we are 
chez nous. It is simply a question of affinities and 
reactions ; as it were, a chemical problem. At 
identical stages of culture, ethical prepossession, 
i.e. taste in conduct, tends appreciably to repeat 
itself unchanged in different individuals, which 
agreement constitutes a social sanction to the taste 
of the group. But that agreement guarantees 
merely a social sanction. The fact that most 
people like dry champagne does not constitute that 
taste an absolute value. There is no difference 
of kind between moral qualities and good manners. 
There is no doubt that such conclusions as these 
are wellnigh intolerable to many people. In fact, 
roughly speaking, it is only those in whom the 
instinct of knowledge has corroded their vitality 
who can endure them complacently. Such as they 
find their greatest joy in the gratification of their 
intellect, and the justification of the world to them 
consists solely in its spectacular value. The Vital 
Instinct may be trusted to keep them in a per- 
manent minority, for too many of them would 
bring humanity to an end. They will not, however, 



160 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

disappear — except, indeed, possibly by violence ! 
For the work of the analysis of the faculty of 
knowledge has been done, and those, whose minds 
are so constructed as to be able to appreciate 
the process will not be able to escape its con- 
clusions. Nor are they really so dangerous to 
the interests of the Vital Instinct as some of its 
champions may think. ' On peut diner sans pdche 
chez les athees, ils se damnent tout seuls,' said 
the Abbe Jerome Coignard. The Philosophy of 
Disillusion has nothing to offer save an entirely 
disinterested intellectual gratification. There are 
those to whom such a gratification is the most 
precious part of their experience, but they are 
very few, and such disinterested spectators of life 
cannot be either proselytisers or fanatics. They 
have no quarrel with life, they are far from the 
intellectual arrogance of pessimism ; on the con- 
trary, echoing Renan's ' Faisons le spectacle aussi 
varie que possible,' they wish, and, au besoin, 
encourage the Vital Instinct to work as energetically 
as is compatible with their own safety. But what 
of the other camp ? Is it permissible, to put the 
question in the terms of M. de Gaultiers hypothesis, 
to attempt to anticipate the secret of Life, to pro- 
phesy the next mask which the Vital Instinct will 
assume? The masks of philosophical religion, 
(Protestantism filtering into Deism,) and humani- 



EPILOGUE 161 

tarian rationalism, seem torn past mending. It is 
difficult to imagine a new one. There is, of course, 
science, but, apart from experimentalists, it does 
not seem capable of creating any great enthusiasm. 
Its intellectual prestige, and its value for industrial- 
ism, for the improvement of the material conditions 
of life, leave untouched the emotional part of man's 
imagination. Under these circumstances it seems 
not impossible that the Vital Instinct may return to 
its earliest, most impenetrable mask, that of direct 
revelation. The means is at hand. In spite of 
philosophers, the Church is still in the world, and 
the principle of the Church is as irrefutable as it 
is indemonstrable. Its methods of representation 
will, no doubt, have to be modified, theology has 
been refuted as fact, and the shreds of philosophy 
with which its apologists have attempted to drape 
it have been ruthlessly torn from it. But surely 
neither the vital instinct nor the Church will be 
embarrassed by such trifles. It may be doubted 
whether any single human being has ever believed 
in a religious dogma as the conclusion of a syllogism. 
Abyssus abyssum invocat. The man in whom the 
vital instinct clamours for the satisfaction of religion 
has already a subconscious faith in religion. And 
the impossibility of establishing such faith either 
on external facts or on philosophy, when thoroughly 
brought home to him, leaves him with the alter- 



162 SIX MASTERS IN DISILLUSION 

native of acceptance of authority or despair. 
Between the two the Vital Instinct cannot hesitate. 
A certain kind of temperament is as much deter- 
mined to believe in religion as a certain kind of 
intellect is determined to do without that belief. 
Or rather, to be exact, the difference is not between 
a temperament and an intellect, if, for the sake of 
argument, these convenient distinctions may be 
drawn, but between two kinds of temperament. 
Pascal had certainly as much intellect as ever fell 
to the lot of the most disabused philosopher. He 
himself indeed was one of the greatest of philosophic 
Nihilists, 1 but his intellect did not prevent him 
believing in the God of Jansenism. And this 
suggests another reflection. The psychological 
unity of the individual, except in a purely 
practical and relative sense, is a deduction from 
spiritualist philosophy. There is no scientific 
reason for thinking that a man's intellect and 
temperament must be unified. Experience also 
shows us that such unification is by no means 
necessary. Pascal is a case in point, and Gassendi 
was an excellent priest and an atheist in philosophy. 
Similarly, there seems no reason why a man should 
not accept the Philosophy of Disillusion with his 
intellect and the Church with his Vital Instinct. 
Such an attitude, to whatever other criticisms it 

1 I hope to discuss this elsewhere in detail. 



EPILOGUE 163 

may be open, at least, in no way offends the laws 
of the intelligence. It is an acute remark of 
M. de Gaultier's that if Kant had been a Catholic 
he would not have written the Critique of Practical 
Reason. Whether such an attitude is likely to be 
widespread is another matter. A man will hardly 
reach the conclusions of philosophic disillusion 
unless he is the fortunate or unfortunate possessor 
of an unusually developed instinct of knowledge. 
The use of his mind must have been a dominant 
and disinterested passion to him, bringing him its 
own joy, simply by its exercise and quite indepen- 
dently of its conclusions. An individual's energy 
being necessarily limited, it seems unlikely that the 
Vital Instinct will be strong enough to create the 
religious need in such a man. But the possibility 
of such a case cannot be denied either by science or 
by the Philosophy of Disillusion. 



S. DOMENICO DI FlESOLE, 
October 1908. 



Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
at the Edinburgh University Press 



